Now Comes the Witch
by horsecrazy2
Summary: Heroes and villains are not supposed to be interchangeable. Ashes to Dust sequel
1. Prologue

**A/N: Welcome to the sequel to Ashes to Dust. Do not read this unless you have finished Ashes, or you're going to be confused as hell. I was not going to post any of this so soon, but I'm in a bit of a slump in regards to posting motivation-I was a bit disheartened over the lack of feedback for the last several chapters of Ashes and the ending in particular, but I promised I would post this, and since this prologue is short, it won't take me long to comb through it and it will make me feel obligated to keep updating since part of the sequel is already up. The first chapter will not be up for a while yet; I'd like to get a little more ahead of myself before posting anything else. I figure this at least offers a little taste of what's to come. **

**This story takes place approximately nine months after Ashes. Hope you enjoy reading as much as I enjoy writing.**

**Prologue**

There are voices in here with her.

_There are voices in here with her _and where's _Squall _and she is scared and cold and tired and she wants to go _home_-

She does not understand anything.

Her eyelids flicker REM twitches that scrape threads of lash against her cheek and there is a knot in her throat that tastes like old blood, or new-she's not sure. She is an anesthetized lump in a coffin and her tongue is a dry desert-parched meat-pile that won't let her speak, that won't let her _breathe_-

There's no air in here. There's no _air _in here _there's no air in here-_

The voices are scratching around in her head, little fishermen's hooks inside her brain.

She can see a boy with dark hair and blue eyes and this smile that just barely picks up the corners of his lips, like he's not used to the expression-

_-don't think about him rinoa rinoa he left you he doesn't _love _you rinoa-_

Rain is drumming drumming drumming against her skin and underneath her cheek is a precipitation-greased sidewalk that holds heads of dying children, blinking slow disbelieving tics of death reflex. Their wrists show her toothless gapes of bloody thick-lipped smiles-

And she can see black-crisped ends of nerves, dangling loosely in the breeze.

_-he made you kill those children don't you remember that rinoa don't you remember how he made you kill them you didn't want to kill them did you of course not it was all him-_

She thinks she can feel her left hand trembling, just slightly.

There is an experimental flex inside her mind, a central nervous system ripple down her arm-

And now her left hand is a ball of fist, pressed up against a smooth blank curve of plexiglass.

Her fingernails peal slithering chalkboard scrapes that stab her ears like knives-

_-ashes ashes we all fall down remember except they don't understand rinoa they don't _get _it we're going to burn them aren't we we're going to burn the children for doing this to us-_

She doesn't _want _to burn the children-the children are already dead she has _already _killed them-

_-he was supposed to _protect _you rinoa and look what he let happen look what he _did _to you-_

There is a pretty blue-eyed blonde girl with an open maw for a chest and a sobbing blonde-haired boy holding her and there is a sudden squeeze like a clench of fist inside her and she is so very very terrified that perhaps she has killed them too-

Her heart is a little hummingbird flutter inside her chest, and that ball of fist is an open scrabbling palm press now, trying to find something to hold onto.

There is _nothing_-where has all the damn _air _gone-

_-rinoa calm down you're not alone remember you're not alone calm down rinoa it's going to be all right they can't do this to us-_

She twitches a dry slow slide of desert-parched tongue across her lips, and tastes blood.

Why is there blood where is it _coming _from-

There is a raw-meat hunk of cheek skin, sitting on her tongue. It's a leather-frayed wad against her teeth and from somewhere in the back of her mind there is a thought that doesn't make sense to her-_tastes like cafeteria hot dogs_-and inside her throat there is a blood clot of a laugh-

And her lashes flutter painful bandage-rips of careful slit-eyed opening.

The world is a smear of interstellar black before her.


	2. Chapter One

**A/N: Ta da! So to no one's surprise I'm sure, I reached my chapter goal a little earlier than I originally predicted and decided to sneak the first chapter in before Christmas, because I am greedy and want people reading my fic instead of off being distracted by new presents. This was mentioned in the prologue, but in case anyone's forgotten, this fic takes place about nine months after Ashes. Also, if you've finished Ashes, which you should have if you're reading this, it goes without saying that you should expect extremely graphic violence and rampant use of the F bomb. Also, SEX. If that's a problem for you...then I have to wonder how you made it through the first fic. **

**If you didn't notice in Ashes, I sort of just like to toss you right into the middle of everything and let you pick things up as the fic goes along-so I promise eventually we'll catch up with everyone and see what they've been up to for the last nine months. Big thanks to those of you who reviewed the last chapter of Ashes-Burned, I appreciate you stepping out of lurker mode to let me know what you thought of the story. I like to see new faces. Hope you guys enjoy.**

**Disclaimer: This is my one disclaimer for the entire story; it is probably entirely unnecessary considering that I'm certain all of you are well aware that I do not own any part of FF8, but it never hurts to be on the safe side. So anyway, SquareEnix owns the world of FF8 and all characters within it and I am just a broke wannabe author borrowing them for a little while and abusing the crap out of them. **

**Chapter One**

General Devan Riker's Mansion

Deling City

Instant death is a joke. Everything shuts down at a different rate, the bowels, the bladder, the heart-they're all going, but how fast and how violently depends on the severity of the wound and the willpower of the unlucky fuck shitting his pants while his brain siphons cognitive power off to more important systems.

Breaking the nose and driving the bone splinters up into the brain? Urban legend shit.

This is the way it really goes:

The feet swing and flail and beat out a tattoo pattern of futile struggle against the floor. The face contorts and purples and then slowly, finally, becomes slack, saliva-roped corpse white around dull-marble eyes.

And there is a puddle of shit at your feet. There is a urine-reeking oil slick of yellow-vomit splash and shitstain brown all swirling together underneath your boots, and if you're a little bit of a sick fucker-

There's a part of you that likes it.

There's a part of you that savors it all, standing over a wad of shit-streaked meat-pile that used to be a man, cracking your knuckles.

It's not that you enjoy shit-smell and finger-slithers of blood-flecked vomit creeping over your scuffed-all-to-fuck boots, get it?

It's that you _won_. It's that this shit-streaked meat-pile went toe to toe with you, balls to the wall-and lost. Because you're stronger, faster, _better_, and just for this one blood-putrid moment you get to revel in that, roll it around in your fucking heart and let it peel your lips up off your teeth in a smile that's not quite a smile-

And then it's time to get the fuck out.

And maybe there's a head or two or four you have to crack on the way out, maybe there are more shit-streaked meat-piles to leave behind and rib-punctured sacs of lung to turn into wet sprays of dying blood-flecked cough across the lips-

But that's all right. Part of the job. Maybe these poor bastards coughing up larynx like shrapnel were just doing their own jobs, maybe they were just down-on-their-luck mercenaries who took any sort of shit security job they could get, but you leave them alive when they've seen a face as distinctive as yours, and next thing you know you've got the whole fucking Galbadian army up your ass.

You've got all these sounds catalogued: branch-snaps of greenstick fracture and _hrk hrk hrk's _of shattered windpipe poking up red-smeared tongues of heel-splintered larynx, moist sickday hacks that spit clots of red-oozing slime at your feet-

And suddenly you're wishing she was with you. You want her soothing instructor's voice, that calm measured cadence meant to smooth exam-rattled nerves, that little conciliatory whisper in the dark, talking you down from another nightmare.

Maybe you're not as much of a sick little fucker as you think. You're past vomiting in the alleyway after your murders-that came after the first time you ever killed a man-but when the adrenaline fades, when it is suddenly just a faint fading hint of metal on your lips-

You're still bent over at the waist staring at your boots, these steel-capped scuffed-to-fuck boots with the worn-thin tongues that have carried you through battles and deaths of mothers and first loves, that have been with you through training center rampages and blood-soaked failures of field exams and soundless shadow-painted chambers of bedrooms your mother has just left-

And you've gotta' wonder why the fuck are you just standing here, what are you doing holding your stomach and this rain-greased alleyway wall like your legs aren't going to do it for you anymore-

And that's when you realize you've got a little secret. Not quite the move-aside motherfucker you thought you were, are you?

What you're really shocked about is not the death, not the blood-flecked vomit or pink-tinged shit-puddle tonguing your boots-

But how much you like it sometimes.

Mommy really did a number on you, didn't she?

* * *

><p>She was bent over her desk filling out paperwork when he slipped quietly inside her classroom, shutting the door soundlessly behind him.<p>

The flowers Wuss had strong-armed him into buying hung loosely swinging at his side, his pulse a thick drumbeat quiver in his throat.

His palms became sweat-smeared lumps of fist that embedded a couple of thorns like little fucking claws, and he mouthed a soundless lip-twist of an expletive as he yanked them out.

Call him a fucking candy-ass, standing here gaping at the back of this woman's head like it was the most fucking precious thing in the world to him, but you know-

He'd almost lost it. He'd spent an entire fucking eternity with his cheek against her chest listening to pretentious jackasses of doctors yammer on in the background about survival odds and life support and some shit about 'cognitive function,' and he could still hear it all-soft heart pulse beeps of vitals monitors and tire-leak hisses of inhalations, expanding her chest one fractional millimeter at a time-

He shut his eyes.

The sun was just beginning to leak thin strips of blind-filtered pink through the far window when he opened them again.

He looped the bouquet through the door handle and slipped both his hands over her eyes from behind, smiling as he brought his chin down on top of her head. There was a split-second flinch of lost composure, of coiling soldier's muscles preparing to fight, and then she leaned back against her chair, relaxing.

"Guess who," Seifer told her in a poorly-disguised voice.

"Squall?" Quistis cried excitedly, and he dropped his hands.

"That's not even funny, Instructor," he snapped.

She swiveled around to face him, and there was a smile on her face that wiped the scowl from his lips and the frown from his brow, and maybe it was pathetic as hell, maybe it was gagging-on-his-fucking-knees queer, but cut him a fucking break-he hadn't seen her in two goddamned _months_-

His irritation unclenched like a fist unraveling from his heart, and then she had the lapels of his coat in her hands, and the last blood and vomit and shit-stained eight weeks of his life fell away from him like prison shackles coming off, and he backed her up against the desk with his arms around her waist as she came to both feet.

She arched into him as his mouth came down hard, and for a long moment there was just her hair in his hand and his tongue in her mouth and those perky fucking tits smashed up against his chest, and holy fucking _Hyne _he hadn't been laid in way too goddamned long.

She had her SeeD uniform on and he pushed her down on top of the papers she'd been bent over just a minute before, his hands going to her bare thighs, jerking that ridiculous little fucking skirt up until he could see the edge of her panties.

He pressed himself between the open v of her knees, kissing her neck.

"Seifer," Quistis panted, shoving unenthusiastically at his shoulders. "One of my students might walk in."

He smiled against the curve of her throat. "I locked the door."

"Still." She pushed at his shoulders again. "I don't think it's appropriate-"

He popped the first button on her top. "Is that why you've got your legs around my waist? Because you _don't _want me to bend you over the desk?"

"You are _not_-"

He curved his hand around the back of her neck, smashing their mouths together again, his free hand fumbling with the next button down as her hips came up in a stroke that made him want to throw her down across all those tidy stacks of papers and color-coordinated rows of student-gifted knickknacks and fuck her until she screamed, until his name was an animal-grunt mantra on her lips-

Seifer pulled her shirt open. "Come on, Instructor," he gasped, bending over to kiss one breast just above the line of her bra. "Don't tell me you didn't fantasize about this all those years you spent pretending you were grading papers and not thinking about the size of my-"

She jerked him up against her with a short hard yank of her thighs, and his brain shorted out.

He unbuckled his pants with shaking hands and pushed her panties out of the way, bunching her skirt up around her waist, and then he was in, he was buried to the fucking hilt, and he just stood there for a moment with his hands braced to either side of her on the desk, his breath coming in sharp winded gasps that made her smile hazily.

He held her hips as he began to thrust, and Quistis leaned forward far enough to rest her forehead against his; she had her tongue in his mouth again, and maybe she'd started off uncertain how to use it, but she sure as shit knew what to do with it now.

"Did you miss me?" he asked when she pulled back, his fingers sliding around her hips to grip her by the ass, his lips punctuating the question with little short pecks of kisses along her jaw line and down her throat.

"Parts of you." She smiled.

"Instructor, I'm hurt. I thought about you every day while I was away, and not just when I was touching myself, either."

She brought both arms up to circle his shoulders, digging her nails into his back.

He started to thrust harder as she dragged her tongue across his ear lobe, burying his face in her sweat-slick neck, and when she hissed a sharp little cry that became a clamp of teeth against his shoulder, he slammed to a stop on the down stroke, his fingers dimpling her hips and his breath shifting her hair, teetering on the edge of fucking losing it.

She slid her fingers down through his and pushed him back just slightly, the leg hooked around his waist nudging him forward again, and there was a little superior smirk on her lips as he came; Seifer pulled her other leg up over his hip and jerked her up against him by the ass, stumbling backward until he hit her chair and landed in it with Quistis on top.

He shoved her bra up without even undoing it, tonguing her nipple into his mouth.

She went rigid against him, hands curled into fists against his shoulders, and he was going to blow his fucking load _again _if she didn't hurry the goddamned hell up-

He looked up with a little smirk of his own as she suddenly stiffened again and dropped her head back, panting; he yanked the clip from her hair and chucked it clattering across the room, fisting his hand in that long loose-dangling ripple of blonde as she rode him.

She clamped down on his fucking dick and brought her head sharply back up, holding his face between her hands and kissing him like she wanted to take his fucking lips off, and he could only hang limply between those little sweat-smeared palms breathing like a runner on his last mile, trying to keep up with her.

He brought his arms up around her as she sagged panting against him, kissing her forehead.

They sat like that for a while with his cheek against her forehead until at last she slid off him, and he stood up to pull his pants back up around his hips while she adjusted her skirt.

He slumped back down in her chair again, reaching for her hand. A sharp yank on it brought Quistis stumbling forward against him, and he reached up to loop an arm around her waist, pulling her down onto his lap. "Thanks for the welcome, Trepe. I mean, a party would have been nice and all, but this was good too." He tucked sweat-soaked strands of hair behind her ear, smiling.

She rolled her eyes. There was a faint flush across her cheeks that made him smile again, that made him bring his lips still smiling to her own-it was really kind of fucking endearing when she did that, which made him want to bitch-slap his candy-ass pussy-whipped self.

Trust Quistis to fuck him like it was going out of style, and then sit here and blush about it afterward.

She leaned her head down against his shoulder. "I didn't realize you'd be home today."

He twisted his fingers through sex-snarled loops of hair. "I didn't know for sure that I'd be getting back today, so I didn't say anything. Pubes likes to ship me off somewhere else at the last minute." He scowled suddenly. "Probably so I'm not here to rip off his head and shove it up his ass when I catch him going through your panties."

"Yes, Seifer-I'm sure he finds lots of time between fighting a war to rifle through my unmentionables," she said dryly.

"Tch. He's probably got his dick in one hand under the desk at all those 'meetings' he's calling you into his office for." He tightened his arm around her.

"Are you jealous?" She tilted her head back up to smile at him.

"Of _Pubes_? Tch."

The phone on her desk buzzed and he loosened his hold on Quistis just enough for her to lean forward and answer it, his hand still combing lazily through her hair. The smile on her face made something ball up in his stomach, and his teeth came down hard enough on the side of his cheek to flood his mouth with something that tasted like the last eight weeks of his life.

He knew who it was before the name even crossed her lips.

He watched her nod into the phone like the prick on the other side could see her, and when she hung up he had both arms across his chest and a scowl on his face, and the smile on her lips faded as she turned back to him in time to catch it.

"I'm sorry, but I need to-"

"Pant after Leonhart like a bitch in heat?" Seifer snapped.

The skin between her eyebrows wrinkled up warningly; it was her no-nonsense instructor's look, the one he used to imitate behind her back, and he wasn't _in the goddamned mood for it_, all right? She couldn't send him to detention anymore, and fucking him into a better mood wasn't yet an option, either.

"Seifer, it's important. We are at war, if you'll recall."

"No, I just spend the last two months handing out fucking _candy _to a bunch of pricks on the other side."

Her mouth tightened. "You don't have to be so touchy."

"You don't have to be so condescending, _Instructor_. I just got back; I don't have a fucking clue when I'm getting packed off again-I'll probably end up in Trabia next time. You can't put Pubes off for even one goddamned day?"

She sighed, her face softening fractionally. "I'm sorry; you'd never believe how much paperwork a war generates. Supply requests, training requests, requests for assistance, etc, and on top of it all, we're still getting admissions forms. Not as many as before, but there are still people on our side with grandiose dreams of being the hero that Esthar needs." She pushed her glasses back up her nose. "Maybe later tonight-"

He stood up, shoving both hands into his pockets and not bothering to clear the sneer from his face. "I'm sure Pubes has stuff you can help him with later tonight."

She followed him to the door. "Is it really necessary to act like a child?"

Seifer yanked the bouquet he'd looped through the handle of the classroom door out from that curve of polished steel and thrust it into her hands. "_Here_," he snarled. "See you around, Instructor, unless I get my ass shot off between now and the next time you have time for something more than a wham bam thank you ma'am."

"Seifer-"

He let the door slam in her startled face.

* * *

><p>Hrr-<p>

Wazzat-

_Hrr_-

What-

'S hot-

_Hrr_-

Wazzat…what's that sound-

'S too hot, Selph, hard to move-

Smells like burned meat…Dincht…somethin' about Dincht-

_Hrr_-

That's his breath…sounds like it's not going down too well-

_-crumpled teeth of blast-punctured rooftop-_

Dincht…Dincht man ya' need to hold on-

Dincht…you there man-

_-charred-off stumps of leg joint spitting tangled end-frayed strands of veins-_

_Hrr_…hurts to move…hurts to breathe…he keeps tasting fire, keeps smelling overdone-meat reek and potassium chlorate stench and shit-smoke of battlefield scent-

_-heat and vine creepers of smoke and pain so much Hyne-damned _pain _he's on _fire _here and does anyone even know what the hell's happened to Zell-_

Flickers of lash show him rain-swollen clouds and serrated craters of explosion-buckled metal and if he leans his head just slightly to one side he can see a blast-eaten boot, half a leg still inside it.

Not Dincht's, is it?

Can't remember what the guy's shoes look like.

Sky's spinning out above him, and _air_, man-it's just not happening for him…can't pull it through his lips, can't suck it down into his lungs…can't do a damn thing with it-

Ground's hard as a damn boulder underneath him…might be lying on part of the truck-

Not a whole lotta' pain left…gotta' wonder if there's even still enough left of him to hurt-maybe he's all burned-off torso from the waist up and nothing else…maybe the blast-eaten boot with the half a leg is his-

Never thoughta' that before…what it's gonna' be like, missing a leg…

Ever thought about dyin'…not just what it's gonna' feel like and if there's gonna' be a light at the end and if you're headin' up or goin' down…talkin' 'bout dyin' like sandpaper scraping your lungs every time you're tryin' to breathe and a phlegm wad of clot in your throat screwin' everything all to shit with that breath that's not working right anyway…ever thought about that kind of death-

Clouds look like Chocobo from here, from this ground, from this angle with blood-film or impending blindness or whatever the heck it is across his eyes and everything's still and soundless and there's no more artillery roar of battle shooting down friends beside him and the only _hrk hrk hrk _of blood-bubbling throat wheeze is his own now-

Can't see where his hat's gone…gonna' miss that stupid thing…been through a lot with him…

Still…_hrr_…_hrk_…wonderin' what the end's gonna' be like, how long it's gonna' take and whether she's somewhere waiting for him-

Dear Selphie…think I'm gonna' die today…hope to see you soon…love, Irvine…

* * *

><p>One of Cid's orphans once asked him what it was like, being brave all the time.<p>

He wouldn't know.

He wanted to tell him brave's got nothin' to do with being a soldier when you're huddled underneath the woman you love while feeble hacks of coughs spray blood across your face. Brave's got nothin' to do with it, when your friend's swinging limply blood-streaked from your arms and the sky's a smear of shit-scented dawn over your head-

But you don't say that to a six-year-old.

He couldn't even remember what he'd said. Something appropriately censored-something full of crap bravado and toothy broad-lipped hero's smiles he stopped believing in a long time ago…something a six-year-old needed to hear, because one day he'd grow up, stop believing all the bullshit-and give a child a childhood, you know?

He'd never had much of one.

They were all sorta' cheated, you ask him.

He's not even sure why he's thinking about this.

He's not even sure why he's able to think about anything.

There's no more overdone-meat reek or _hrk hrk hrk _of blood-bubbling throat wheeze anymore, though.

Oughta' be a good sign.

Might mean he ain't going to see Selphie after all, though.

Some days, that's all he really wants. Some days, there's a little part of him that hopes the next shell-shatter of incoming bomber strike flattens him and not the guy next to him, and maybe it's messed up as hell-

But he's loved her since they were kids. Since he was _six_. There's no where to put all of that, you know? No matter how long she's gone. There's this little theory that time heals everything, but he's still not convinced of that.

Almost a year, and he still cries himself to sleep some nights. Not when there's anyone around to hear, of course, but when Dincht's a couple of houses down bothering Seifer or out on a mission or snoring away in the next room over…well, a guy can't be expected to be a big tough swaggering cowboy all the time, right?

There's something coming into focus above him now.

Short brown hair shining in the rain-

Can't quite help himself-heart's thundering in his chest because maybe he's wrong after all-maybe he's dead and she's here for him and there's a smile on his lips and light in his heart and he's stretching one blood-smeared hand peeled open to the bone up toward her-

And the facial structure's all wrong.

Voice ain't right, either.

Somethin' in his throat-

Blood or tears or maybe a gnawed-off slab of cheek but whatever it is isn't letting him breathe and the face with the eyes that are brown and not green is blurring out above him and there's a tension-ratcheted voice calling him buddy that he recognizes but not quite enough to place it-

And there's a hand on his face. It slides over his jaw and up onto his cheek and he'd like to pretend it's hers, for just a little while-

The sky's still spinning above him and that boot with the half a bomb-scorched leg's still just lying there leaking tattered little cables of veins that mighta' been his once-

So he closes his eyes. He tongues a clot-smeared wad of phlegm from his throat and pretends that hand on his face and those fingers on his neck are hers and maybe he's just beyond pain now, but he'd like to think it's her waiting for him that makes everything so much easier.

Not a whole lotta' anything left now.

Someone holdin' his hand. That's nice. Always used to be afraid he was going to go out alone, you know? Probably every soldier's worst nightmare, lying alone on a blood and shit-smudged battlefield all tramped into that smear of death-reeking sludge trying to hold your guts inside all by yourself because your friend's already dead on the ground next to you-

Least, that's what he dreams about. That's what snaps him sweating up from twists of sheet that try to pull him back down, when he's not picturing Quisty bleeding in his arms or Selphie inhaling her final failing wheeze underneath a curve of blood-flecked plastic. Dincht gasping in his arms through blood bubbles of bullet-smashed windpipe, Squall going up like a blaze of torch underneath an onslaught of Firaga-even that asshole Almasy, lying facedown on that blood and shit-smudged battlefield scrabbling at the ground underneath like it's going to save him, trailing the stump of his artillery-severed torso-

It's not any wonder he's not real enthusiastic about sleeping anymore.

Probably doesn't have much of a choice right now, though.

Behind his eyes there's a diagonal wipe of fade to black that grays out the whole world underneath his eyelids-

It's all sawed-off body parts and flickers of halting hisses of machine-coaxed breaths in the dark anyway, so no loss-

And then it's all gone.

Funny thing is there's no light or world-ending revelation or jigsaw pieces of fractured fleeting moments taken like snapshots from his life-

Just a whole lotta' black.

A whole lotta' feeling like he's falling for Hyne-damned forever, tumbling over and over like he's taking a clumsy flailing nose dive into Time Compression, and then-

* * *

><p>Four Days Later<p>

Balamb

He could barely get out of bed some mornings.

Twenty-fucking-two and he was already a slag heap of arthritic knee pop and storm-twinge shoulder joint, dragging himself into the bathroom like he was pulling himself from the fucking grave.

Most days he just splashed his face down with water, took a piss, and got the hell out of there.

Today he stood at the sink with his hands braced on either side of it, staring at himself.

Sometimes he wondered how nobody else saw what he did. Blonde hair and green eyes and age-puckered forehead scar-and a whole bunch of fucking ghosts swimming around underneath it all, demons with flaming sockets and puppet string limbs and sorceresses with reptile slithers of laughs, whispering about kneeling-

He couldn't remember how many people he'd killed.

That was what he saw staring back from that mirror split down the middle by some old shit-fit-a man with so much blood on his hands he'd finally just said 'fuck it' and stopped keeping track. He used to; he used to keep a running tally of every face he smashed and head he severed, every wet squelch of blade-skewered torso and long shrill whistle of neck smile, spitting air like blood.

The fucking scary thing was, one day standing there in guts to his ankles, he realized he wasn't sure if he was keeping the tally to remember fellow soldiers who'd gone bravely to deaths he'd probably be facing himself one day, to preserve the memory of fathers who did not get to go home and lovers who would never be reunited-

Or if he did it to pat himself on the back. To congratulate himself on being a fucking god, handing out death all around him, sending hordes of soldiers screaming to their knees with missiles and riptides of spell and spurts of artery cut going on above and around and below him and none of it ever touching him-

That was a fucking lie, a little fantasy he liked to tell himself huddled far from home in the trench coat that had been with him through everything a man could experience in a lifetime.

It all touched him. Maybe not right away, maybe not while he was in the middle of everything worrying about not getting his fucking head chopped off or his chest blown open or keeping Zell beside him from becoming another gagging casualty on the ground at his feet, but at night when he grabbed what little sleep brief lulls in the fighting afforded him, he'd lie there wrapped up in that fucking coat seeing skeletal spell-peeled faces missing jaws and eyes and hair, and instead of sleeping he'd just fucking lie there blinking up at the sky, wondering if it was the last one he was ever going to see.

Mostly he tried not to think about how much of the blood on the ground had been put there by him. Hard to sleep with airships screaming overhead and missiles going off and the guy in the tent next to you sobbing for his mother because one of those fucking X-ATMs had cracked his spine like a twig and he was never going to walk again-gave you too much time to think.

Mostly he tried to think about her, curled up next to him under the covers sleeping peacefully with one arm draped across his waist and her cheek pressed to his back.

Today when he splashed water across his face he did it a hell of a lot more roughly than he'd meant to, stinging his fresh-shaved cheeks. He was out of clean towels so he let his hands and his face air dry and shuffled out into the kitchen, rolling his shoulders as he walked.

There was a pathetic little whine and an insistent scratch at the back door, and Seifer rolled his eyes and stumbled his way through the small kitchen toward it, stubbing his toe on a chair.

"Mother_fucker_-the hell do you want?"

He stood frowning down at the panting mutt sitting with its ass planted firmly on his back porch-he didn't have to look a long way down-the thing was the size of a fucking snow lion-and crossed both arms over his chest. "This isn't your goddamned house."

"Yo!" A long high whistle shrilled from somewhere near the neatly-tended row of bushes separating his small little home from the neighbors who hadn't dropped by with one of their revolting welcome-to-the-neighborhood casseroles since they'd realized who he was, which was just fucking fine with him. "Freeloader!"

The dog thundered a bark that made the kitchen windows quiver in their frames, and thumped his tail.

Seifer shook his head and slipped open the door behind him as Zell rounded the line of hedges at a trot, hands in his pockets. "Make yourself at home," he offered with a grandiose sweep of his arm as the dog crammed itself past him, almost putting him on his ass. "Wuss, give the dog his fucking dignity back. Sure he could eat Garden out of a year's worth of profit, and he did take a shit in my garden the other day-which you still haven't picked up with your mouth the way I told you to-but he's more useful to have around than, say, you, and he smells a lot better."

"He inside?"

"Of course he's fucking inside; he spends more time here than you spend fellating hot dogs and being in denial about your sexuality."

"Har har." Zell slapped him hard on the ass as he shoved past, and Seifer turned in a little half circle that brought his ankle up and around in a sweep that brought his friend's legs skidding out from underneath him; Zell made a swipe for a chair, missed, and became a pile on the floor that Seifer stepped casually over, shutting the door behind him.

"Hey, you asshole!"

He sat himself down in the chair Wuss had just made a fumbling failure of a grab for, putting his feet up on the small wooden table that took up most of his dining room.

He laced his hands behind his head. "The fuck do you want, Wuss?"

Zell sprang back to his feet, coming up in a left jab that became a shadowbox blur of uppercuts and short-chambered backfists Freeloader watched with some interest, sniffing curiously around the table near Seifer's feet.

"Get the fuck out of there," he demanded with a scowl, pushing the gigantic head away as it ventured from the table to his crotch. "Just because Wuss spends all his time with his face buried in other men's dicks doesn't mean you need to."

Zell ignored that and began going through his cupboards.

"Fucking help yourself, why don't you?"

"You been to see Irvine lately?" He already had a half-empty package of crackers dangling from one hand and a box of some shitty protein bars Quistis had left behind in the other. He was welcome to those at least; they tasted like fucking chalk. The crackers Seifer snatched back from him as he made himself at home across the table, one of the protein bars already stripped and hanging half-chewed out of his mouth as he spoke. "Hey, mmrrf ererh noof, yef?"

"I don't have a fucking clue what you just said."

Zell swallowed noisily. Seifer blinked. The entire bar was fucking gone; how the shit did Wuss do that without killing himself? There was a dick joke in here somewhere, but he was too tired to touch it for once.

"I said, 'Hey, these aren't bad, yeah?'"

"They're disgusting. Quistis fucking hoovers them while she's going through paperwork, so she keeps a box here for when she's staying over, because where she goes the paperwork goes." He couldn't quite swallow the edge of bitterness from his voice. "And no, I haven't gone back to see Irvine yet. I was going to head over to the infirmary later today."

"He's doing better. I mean, he still looks like shit, but he's sitting up and talking to people and stuff. Ellone's there right now. Quisty probably is too, or at least she was when I left."

He wondered if Zell noticed the subtle tightening of his shoulders at the mention of her name.

"Squall's got a lead on those assholes who hit the truck he was in, so I was gonna' request to be lead on the mission to go in and take the fuckers out and I was thinkin'-"

"I already took care of it."

Zell stopped chewing with his mouth hanging half-open, showing Seifer little masticated chunks of artificial chocolate-flavored bar like lumps of shit.

His stomach heaved a little.

"Huh?" He scratched his head. "What do you mean you already took care of it?"

He meant he'd ripped them all to such little fucking pieces they weren't getting identified by anything other than their dental records. Five of them, one of him, and he'd torn through them like little fucking paper dolls, boy Seifer on a rampage because Quistis had bossed him around or Selphie wouldn't play the goddamned dragon to his heroic knight, or Wuss had cried again when he stuffed sand down his pants and he was fucking sick of it all.

It was supposed to be a quick job, a don't-fuck-with-us message to the higher-ups over in Galbadia. A slit throat here, before the guy could even call out a warning, a blade through the heart there…wham bam thank you ma'am like Quistis fucking him on that desk and then abandoning him for Pubes. Except when he'd stepped into that fire cavern where the fuckers were taking refuge everything suddenly just hit him, the cowboy trying to smile up at him through burned-away lips like Seifer was the one who needed fucking comforting, like lying there on that exam table with a charred stump of a body was just one more day in the life of Irvine Kinneas-

And he'd gone fucking blood-simple, where the only thing that mattered to him was getting his teeth in their fucking throats, was making them feel like he did, like someone was standing on his fucking chest and the whole goddamned world was compressing itself around him because some asshole he never wanted to care about in the first place might be dying while they were just _sitting _here joking and drinking and playing cards-

He didn't want to fucking think about it. He hadn't slept since he'd stepped numbly from that cavern with Hyperion over his shoulder and blood burning in his eyes because he was too fucking shaken to wipe it away, and he hadn't talked to Quistis in four goddamned _days _and-

Cry him a fucking river. Life was too goddamned hard for _him_?

Irvine was lying in Garden's infirmary breathing through a set of prosthetic lungs because fire and smoke and splinters of bomb-singed truck metal had destroyed his. Seifer didn't have a single fucking right to sit here and piss and moan.

"I took _care of it_. Fucking drop it."

Zell frowned and crumpled up the wrapper in his hand, making a shot for the corner-tucked wastebasket that missed. "Fine." He looked away, cracking his knuckles. "You shoulda' _told _me, though, man. I mean…Kinneas is…Kadowaki said he's got bad nerve damage but he's probably going to get full function back in his arms and legs and stuff, but he's going to be really scarred up, and it's going to take a while before he's even up and walking again. And they _did that to him_, man. I can't _stand _just sitting around here with my thumb up my butt-"

"You're not cut out for revenge," Seifer interrupted, ignoring Freeloader as the dog nudged his arm. What he meant was he didn't want Zell wondering what kind of twisted fucking monster was staring back at him every time he happened past a goddamned mirror, but he didn't say that. What he meant was this little tattooed freak across from him had somehow become so fucking important that any little fleeting chance he could take to keep him out of something that might end with Zell Dincht coughing up lung in his arms one day-

He was going to seize it with both hands and hold on for all he was fucking worth.

He didn't say that either.

He took his hands from behind his head and looped his arms across his chest, glaring off into the distance over Wuss' shoulder. "Has Quistis been there a lot? At the infirmary?"

"Yeah; she's been pretty much camping out there. Ellone too. What's going on with you two, anyway? Get in a fight?"

"No."

"Did you get her those flowers like I told you to?"

"No." He scowled.

Zell snickered suddenly, and some of the tension in the kitchen splintered. Seifer felt his shoulders ease just a fraction of an inch, and Freeloader crowded him again with a tail wag that nearly took out the whole goddamned table.

"Man, Almasy, you can't lie for shit. So what happened? You give her the flowers and she didn't fall at your knees kissing your ass or something? You're just supposed to do it to be nice, you know. She doesn't have to, like, craft an altar in your image and worship at it."

"She ditched me for Pubes," he snapped, jerking a hand through his hair. "I'm back for three fucking seconds and she's running off to his office because he called and said he needed her. And I haven't see her in two fucking _months_." He sat forward with his hands dangling in the v of open space between his knees, frowning. "You think something's going on between them?"

Zell sagged back in his chair, blowing out a noisy heave of a sigh that brought the dog's head around with a sharp snap of ears the size of Seifer's fucking arm. "Almasy, come _on_; I'm not going over this again. Quistis is, like, completely in love with you. For some reason. I know she had something going on for Squall, but that was a long time ago, and any idiot can see that she's head over heels for you. 'Cept you, apparently. I mean, maybe Squall's coming around a little, realizing what he missed out on when he had his chance-" He cut himself off abruptly, reaching jerkily for the package of crackers in front of Seifer.

Seifer snatched it away. "The fuck is that supposed to mean?"

"Uh, nothing. I don't know. I didn't say anything." He screwed his face up like he was holding back a massive shit, and Seifer vaguely contemplated punching him right in the middle of that ridiculous fucking tattoo.

"You look like you just crapped your fucking pants. What the hell were you talking about?"

Zell sighed again, slumping a little. "Look, I don't know-I'm probably wrong. So there's really no reason for me to say anything."

"I'm going to snap your neck," Seifer hissed, leaning forward. "Spit it the fuck out."

"Well, you know…Squall just seems…I don't know…he might…" Zell rubbed his eyes. "He might have a little crush on Quisty or something, from what I've seen lately. I mean, you know, I don't think there's ever going to be anyone for him except Rinoa, but he's lonely, and Quisty's been helping him out a lot lately, with all the technical stuff and you know, just being there for him as a friend and stuff, and maybe he's just kind of…uh…overly grateful for that."

Seifer's hand tightened on the package he was holding, a fist clench that crumpled it in his fingers with an explosive little crinkle that snapped Freeloader's head hopefully around. His voice when he spoke was as tight as the knot in his fucking chest, contracting like a noose around his heart. "Did Pubes…" The entire world had gone red-smoked in front of him, like someone had dipped his whole house in the blood that thundered in his ears and roiled in his heart, and he heard his teeth come together with a nails-on-chalkboard shriek that pushed him forward to the edge of his chair, one hand in a fist on his thigh and the other still in a white-knuckled vise around that finger-dented package. "Did Pubes _do _something?"

"No!"

"_Dincht_!" he barked. "Don't fucking lie to me."

"I shouldn't have said anything, Seifer. I mean, _I _didn't see anything. I mean, _no one _saw anything. Shit…" He tangled one hand up in the spikes of his hair. "It's probably just a rumor."

That little smile on her face as she answered the phone, because it was _him _she was talking to-

God_dammit_.

"What. _Happened_." He made his voice very flat and measured and careful, because that red-smoked window pane past the curve of Zell's shoulder was suddenly starting to look an awful lot like Squall's face smashed up against Quistis', and if someone didn't tell him what the fuck was going on _right now_, he was going to march down to that prick's office and punch Leonhart's head off his neck.

"Uh…look, it was just something I heard last time I was home on leave, but I didn't say anything because I just wrote it off because it was stupid, you know? And it was coming from some third year who sounded like she had maybe three brain cells to rub together. But she said somethin' about Squall escorting Quistis to the SeeD ball the Festival Committee's throwing in honor of Selphie and that she's stuck on paper duty so much and not out fighting because they're having an affair and Squall wants her at Garden where she's safe. Ok, so the last part's a bunch of bullshit for sure-told ya' she was real dumb-but the first part might be true. I mean, I can't really see Squall going to the SeeD ball without Rinoa around to force him, but Ellone told me she talked to him recently and she was trying to convince him to do it." He cracked his knuckles again, looking nervous. "Because it's good for morale or somethin' with all the fighting going on to have something fun, and she said he needs a break. But she wasn't trying to persuade him to take Quistis or anything. She doesn't know about that part. Like I said, probably just rumor-"

Seifer sat back in his chair, pinching the bridge of his nose.

"Hey, man, you ok?"

He was just fucking peachy. Just fucking _grand_-who wouldn't want to hear that the woman they loved was probably being pursued by some constipation-faced emo asshole she used to have a massive fucking hard-on for?

"Hey, just because you're gone all the time and Quisty's kinda' lonely doesn't mean she's gonna' go for Squall, even if he does have a thing for her-"

"Would you pull your foot out of your mouth for one fucking second, Wuss?" The fist on his thigh wound even tighter; he felt his knuckles creak warningly. "How do you know there's nothing going on on her end?"

"'Cause Quisty loves _you_, dumbass."

"She was obsessed with that stupid asshole for years."

"Yeah, _a long time ago_. Jeeze, man, let it go. Even if Squall has feelings for her-and I'm not even sure he does, I'm _just saying _that sometimes it seems like he might, but I don't know-it doesn't mean Quisty's interested in anything more than being his friend. Look, why don't we just go see Irvine, huh? You can talk to her and get everything straightened out."

Seifer dropped the package in his right hand, letting it hit the table with a thump. "Yeah. I think me and Quistis have a couple of things we need to get straight."

"_Don't _be an asshole; you do that and maybe she _will _start wondering why the hell she's with you in the first place. I mean, not like Squall's a lot better-didn't he tell her to talk to a wall or something? But Quisty's stubborn and if you're a jerk about all this, she'll just get pissed, you guys'll get in a big fight, and then you'll be over at my place drinking all my beer and whining about how you don't want to lose her. You're kind of a big pussy when you get really drunk, you know that?"

"Is that _really _what you want to say to me right now?" he snapped, standing up.

Zell smirked and held up his hands. "Whatever. Just don't screw things up; I haven't had any time to go out and get more beer. I only got two bottles left, man. They're _mine_." He scraped his chair back and followed Seifer out the back door, patting Freeloader absently on the head. "Maybe you just shouldn't bring anything up at all, huh? You'll probably act like a dick and make a big deal out of nothing."

Seifer slammed the door behind them.

* * *

><p>Quistis woke with a start when someone tapped her on the shoulder, not gently. She snapped both eyes open to see Irvine sleeping peacefully, one black-burned hand peeking out from underneath the blanket Ellone had arranged over him before she left to visit Squall-<p>

And Seifer's face, looming over her looking none-too-pleased.

She suppressed a sigh.

"We need to talk."

"Seifer, I don't think this is really the time to-"

"Is Squall taking you to the SeeD ball?"

She snapped her mouth shut mid-sentence, glancing across the room to Kadowaki filling out paperwork at her desk and motioning for him to lower his voice. "We discussed it. How did you-"

"Are you fucking him?" he demanded roughly, looking away from her. It was a dry sandpaper scrape of a question, and all the anger in his eyes suddenly shorted out when he asked it, leaving him exhaustedly blood-shot and swaying on his feet in front of her, like something inside of him had loosened and was no longer holding him up. She watched him press the tips of his fingers against the wall beside him and stood up with a frown, crossing her arms.

"Of course not. Why would you even ask that?"

He shut his eyes and dragged one hand down his face.

"Seifer, are you all right?"

"I might be, if Chicken Wuss hadn't told me there's a rumor going around Garden that you and Leonhart are fucking each other," he snapped.

She brought one hand up to touch his arm as he swayed again, gripping that heavily-muscled forearm underneath his trench coat before he could go sliding down the wall he kept leaning on more and more gratefully. "Yes, Seifer, I'm so unsatisfied in this relationship that I let you ruin three very important reports that were on my desk a few days ago that happened to…get in the way. I take it you noticed my lack of enthusiasm? I thought I hid it better," Quistis said dryly. "I think you need to sit down."

"I'm _fine_."

"You look like a train wreck."

"Gee, _thanks_, Instructor."

She wanted to punch the sneer off his face. "Sit down or get marched off to my room and put to bed like a child. You look like you haven't slept in a year."

"Is that what you say to Pubes?"

"_Seifer_!"

She saw Kadowaki's face tilt slowly up from her paperwork, frowning. "Is there a problem, you two? I have patients who need to rest. Work your issues out in the hallway."

"We apologize," Quistis told her crisply, fisting one hand in the collar of Seifer's jacket.

She was still contemplating hitting him when she dragged him out into the thankfully empty hallway. "This is ridiculous, Seifer. First you go storming out of my office because I have the gall to be diligent about my job-"

"With Pubes-"

"Who is in charge of the B. Garden regiments and ensuring that they are properly trained and outfitted before heading out to _war _where they will die if those of us here neglect our duties."

"And dancing cheek to cheek with Pubes' hand up your fucking skirt is part of your 'duties'?" His forehead scar creased in a scowl that he aimed away from her down the hallway, one hand coming up to ruffle the hair at the nape of his neck, and something inside of her balled up like a fist, spreading into the knot at her throat that had not dissolved since Irvine was brought in barely alive and nearly unrecognizable as the handsome young sharpshooter.

Burn-blisters and scab-flakes of pus-oozing lesions that would become life-threatening infections if left too long-those were the only things she had been able to see standing in this hallway with her hand over her mouth and Ellone beside her gripping one hand hard enough to hurt. Flame-curled ends of glossy shampoo commercial ponytail spread out in ripples of explosion-scorched black-

She'd had to look away.

She blinked the memory from out in front of her now, bringing Seifer's profile into focus. "Nothing's been decided about the SeeD ball. Squall is considering cancelling it to use the funds for more weapons. There's nothing to get upset about, Seifer."

He was boyishly cute when he got that little wrinkle of a frown between his eyebrows, and now Quistis wanted to hit herself. Her shoulders slumped just slightly. It was just so _hard _to maintain all this self-righteous anger when she was so Hyne-damned tired and he looked like she'd just smashed the entire world out from underneath him. All the hurt leaking through his fury just made her want to hold him, to be folded in his arms for just the one infinitesimal moment where it was only Seifer Almasy and Quistis Trepe clinging to one another while everything else-the entire world and all its death and children without childhoods and cauterized lumps of gentle-souled cowboys who should never have been soldiers-simply went on without them.

She reached up to brush hair from his face with a sigh. "Do we have to fight, Seifer?"

He pressed the heel of his hand into his eyes, shaking his head. "I haven't slept for three goddamned days. I can't think right now."

Quistis felt her face soften, and she laid her hand back down on his arm, giving it a light squeeze that peeled his hand away from his eyes and made him look at her at last. "I've had only a few hours of sleep in the last couple of days. We're not coming at this with clear heads; why don't we both get some rest and talk about this later, rationally? You don't have anything to worry about, Seifer. You'll see that once you've gotten some sleep."

He stretched one hand up to rub his left temple like it hurt him. "You know what happened to those assholes who did that to him?" he asked suddenly, jerking his head toward the closed door of the infirmary.

Thrown by the sudden change in topic, Quistis slowly shook her head. "Squall received intel on their drop location, where they were supposed to be picked up by air support from Galbadia who would transport the weapons they salvaged from the wreckage back to Esthar. He told me this morning that a team had already been sent a couple of days ago to take care of them-"

"Not a team," Seifer interrupted bitterly, looking away again.

She said very softly, "Oh," and took her hand from his arm. She'd seen brief glimpses of the remains left behind in that cavern, dismembered pieces of lip-gaping throats and brain-leaking halves of skulls staring up through scraped-bloody sockets that used to be eyes.

He swallowed very hard.

More nightmares to wrench harshly panting from, stifling his breathing in his pillow so she wouldn't hear him.

She was tired of the distance between them.

She was tired of the look in his eyes and the half-twist of snarl on his lips, there because he was frightened and hurting and too bull-headed to admit to it all.

She stepped forward to rest her cheek against his broad chest and bring her arms softly curving up around his waist, and his heart in his chest began to thunder underneath her. Quistis closed her eyes to take in everything: faint hint of subtly-applied aftershave and worn-thin down of a shirt cycled through a thousand washings, the shape and warmth of his chest beneath her and the scabbed-over calluses of his soldier's hands, flattening out across her back. She had memorized all of these because every time he left there was always a tight heart-squeezing certainty inside of her that he was not coming back, that this would be the time the knock on her door produced a cadet with hands knotted in front of him and a look on his face that made the tight heart-squeezing certainty inside of her into a cold-winter knowledge that sank its teeth into her chest and would not let go.

For two months she had barely slept or eaten, pushing herself through towering mounds of paperwork with copious amounts of coffee and adrenaline shots she persuaded Kadowaki to administer, hacking her way mindlessly through onslaughts of training center bred toramas and bite bugs while the rest of Garden slept.

On nights it was particularly bad and Zell was home, he let her into the small house Seifer rented along the outskirts of Balamb and she curled up alone in the king-sized bed that was entirely too cold without him. The sheets still smelled like him.

She could sleep sometimes, in that bed that reminded her of him, in the bed he had thrown her laughing onto the first night after he had moved in and he'd carried her across the 'threshhold' over one of his broad shoulders with his hand on her ass. They had not left it for some time, until Zell came thundering up the back step accompanied by the snow lion of a dog he had found wandering nearby and informally adopted despite Irvine's repeated and loud protests against such an undertaking.

She stretched her face up to kiss the line of his jaw, the only part of his face she could reach without going to tip-toe. She watched the hard line of his mouth relax just slightly and smiled, bringing her cheek back down to his chest. "I don't have the energy to fight anymore, Seifer," Quistis said softly. "I don't _want _to fight. Squad C is leaving for Esthar in a week; Zell's going with them, and Squall is probably sending you with them as well-the city needs the reinforcements. I'd rather not spend what little time we have arguing."

He exhaled a long heavy sigh that sagged his chin down onto her head, and the arms just barely looped around her suddenly tightened, yanking Quistis up onto her toes so he could reach her mouth.

He kissed her for a very long time, because he was beaten and exhausted and frightened or perhaps just to wipe Squall from her mind, perhaps to erase any faded lingering affection she might be clinging to, and she did not even really care at this point.

He pushed her back just enough to separate their lips, keeping his forehead against hers. "Look, Trepe-if Pubes so much as fucking-"

"Seifer." She shook her head and pressed her fingers to his lips, stopping him mid-sentence. "Another topic, please."

"Want to fuck on top of your desk again?"

"Not _that _topic." She reached down to slide his hands from her waist, pushing him gently back and reaching up to tuck one stray strand of limp unwashed blonde back into her updo. "Dr. Kadowaki has Irvine on some pretty heavy pain meds right now while she's administering Curaga intravenously; he'll be asleep for a while. I've barely left his room for the last two days and I need to take a shower. If you'd like-"

He smiled thinly, not all of the tension clearing from his brow. "I could come help you?"

"That isn't what I meant. I was going to say there's a bed here you're free to use, and I have some tea Dr. Kadowaki forced on me after two straight weeks of running on caffeine and adrenaline shots. Valerian, I think. Non habit forming."

"It's a nice offer, Instructor, but the only thing that's going to help me sleep is you naked in the bed next to me."

Quistis rolled her eyes. "I fail to see how _that's _going to help."

"So that's a no?"

She pressed her lips together. "It's a 'we'll see.'"

* * *

><p>He was already asleep when she stepped from the steaming peach-scented fog of her bathroom, and she paused in the doorway to watch him as she toweled her hair dry.<p>

As his instructor, in the throes of GF junctioning and unable to remember anything about him beyond the fact that he was an annoying pain in the ass who talked entirely too much during exams and looked at her in ways that made her want to pull her skirt down, Quistis had paid him only the barest amount of attention necessary to keep him relatively under control in her classroom. Which, of course, only made him act out more. Teaching Seifer had been a daily chore, a never-ending test of patience she was constantly on the edge of failing, and she recalled it now with a soft little smile, remembering all the many fantasies she had entertained of slipping her whip around his throat. He had often made comments inviting her to use it on him anyway, so it was not untoward of Quistis to oblige him, or so she had nearly convinced herself several times.

How utterly ironic that she had somehow progressed from wanting to break his arms to falling asleep in them.

She took a seat at her computer, draping the towel over the back of the chair.

The stripes of sleepless tortured nights beneath his eyes were very dark. They reminded her of the ones she rubbed wearily each morning in the mirror, and she stood up as her computer hummed quietly through its boot-up process.

He'd fallen asleep in his coat and his boots; she crouched soundlessly at the end of the bed and deftly unlaced the mud-snarled knots of his laces, sliding his left boot into a pile on the carpet that she would have to go over with a vacuum and stain remover later, considering the state of his footwear. The sight of mud flaking onto her immaculate carpet thinned Quistis' lips a little, until he cracked an eye blearily in her direction and brought one scar-hatched knuckle up into the corner of his eye, frowning. "Time is it?"

"You were only asleep for a few minutes."

He readjusted the arm folded underneath his head, yawning. "Does that mean I missed the shower?" He flipped his hand lazily in her direction. "Could you re-create it or something? I just need the part where you soap up your breasts. And pleasure yourself while moaning my name."

She rolled her eyes and stood up, nudging his feet up onto the mattress. They did not quite fit; he was longer than the small twin-sized frame by a good several inches, and probably would have launched into yet another now-familiar spiel on all the many reasons she needed a bed that wasn't the size 'of his fucking big toe' if he weren't halfway through another yawn.

"Go to sleep," Quistis commanded, turning back to her computer.

"You going to join me?"

"In a minute."

"Get off the fucking computer, Trepe. Esthar's not going to lose the war because you take two fucking seconds to yourself," Seifer mumbled grouchily, tucking his chin into the crook of his elbow.

She sighed. "Are you going to lie there and complain the entire time?"

"Yeah. I can think of a couple of ways you can shut me up, though."

"I'm sure," she replied dryly. "Is checking my e-mail terribly unreasonable, or will you let me get through that at least without all the snide commentary?"

"Depends."

"On?"

"What you do to me afterward." He shot her a sleepy smile that she returned despite herself, and Quistis closed the window currently halfway through the process of loading and stood up with an arch of her back that popped each vertebrae with a satisfying little crack.

He transferred his head from his arm to her thigh as she settled down beside him, and Quistis let her fingers weave themselves through his hair, reaching out with the other hand to snap off the lamp perfectly centered on the small polished nightstand beside her bed.

"I'm being a dick because I'm afraid of losing you, you know." It was a half-asleep mumble, the kind of confession she would never pry from him fully alert, and Quistis' fingers in his hair stopped their slow rhythmic brushstroke of a caress. "'Cause I was your second choice."

Her stomach gave a little lurch that twisted it like her heart, and she sat there for a moment listening to him breathe, the soft unbroken hiss of him alive beside her in the dark, and when her throat had unknotted enough to let her speak at last, he was already asleep again.

"You weren't my second choice, Seifer." She sighed, and brushed the back of her hand across his cheek. "I love you, you stupid ignorant man."

**A/N: So I told myself I was going to give everyone a bit of a break after the events of Ashes...and then I go and basically blow Irvine up in the first chapter. Sigh. There's something wrong with me.** **I am not sure when the next update will be, as the holidays limit my writing time somewhat. I anticipate chapter two going up sometime within the next few weeks or so. It all depends on how much time I have to work on it.**


	3. Interlude One

**A/N: Ok, first of all-please no one cyber kick me in the teeth if you raced over to this convinced a new chapter was up, because, quite obviously, this is not a new chapter. These letters are going to be sprinkled throughout the fic in between chapters and are not necessarily in chronological order, so do not try and match them up with the story's timeline, or you're probably going to end up confused. The second chapter will be up shortly; I want to finish off the chapter I am working on right now before I post it, and it's got just a few more pages to go before it's done. It will probably be done this weekend, although with New Year's celebrations getting in the way somewhat, I can't make any promises. If there is no new chapter this weekend, then you should see one early next week.**

**Also, for those of you who write-you ever wonder if the FBI is tapping your computer and tracking all the different internet searches you carry out? Yesterday I was researching which part of the spinal cord you have to injure when breaking someone's neck to kill them almost instantaneously, and I wanted to type IT'S RESEARCH FOR MY WRITING SWEAR TO GOD OFFICER! at the end of it. Oy. **

_Dear Selph,_

_Sometimes I question what the hell I'm doing with my life. Heck- not even sometimes. Every day I'm out there in the field and I got guys dying all around me and it's like all I can think is why the hell are we doing this? Lotta' good men and women dying, and you know, for what? I got my hand inside some guy's leg holding his femoral artery trying to keep him from bleeding out, and all I can think is why are any of us here, dying for a cause most of us know hardly anything about and only half-believe in? _

_Most of us came to Garden when we were just kids; we didn't know what we were getting into. We thought being a soldier was about being admired, getting to whip around a gun or a sword like you see in the movies, kill the bad guys- least that's what I always thought it was all about. And you know, I never understood what killing the bad guys even meant- eight years old, you're being drilled in hand to hand and basic casting abilities and a couple a easier weapons, and everything's all fun and games cept for a couple of bruises and scratches you're not supposed to whine about anyway, because that's not what soldiers do. Soldiers are tough. Soldiers aren't supposed to cry, even when they find out that killing the bad guy isn't the way the movies make it look- it's not some bad actor pullin constipated face and going to his knees and reeling off some crappy little speech before he just falls over. It's ripping a man's guts out, watching him beg at your feet, watching him bleed out while you're trying not to vomit cause all of a sudden you realize he's probably just like you- got some friends back home and maybe a family, maybe a kid or something, and now they're never going to see him again because you just blew his intestines out. _

_But you already knew that, darlin. _

_Sometimes it was easy for me to forget you were just another one of us, another killing machine rolled off the assembly line, because you were just so _happy_, Selphie honey, and you made me happy. You made everyone happy._

_I never told you, but that was the best memory I took away from Cid and Matron's- your smile, cause it was always there no matter what, and even if you were sad, even if you were having a bad day, you were always there to cheer us up, make Zell feel better because Seifer pushed him down in the ocean, or hug Quisty because the waves knocked over her castles again. _

_I used to think about that smile at G. Garden. They made us watch all these videos during basic training of people dying, guys getting their heads chopped off, women tortured to death, getting raped- just every sick thing you could think of, to 'desensitize' us. First time I stumbled out of class halfway through and made it about three steps into the hallway before I threw up; my instructor called me a pussy and told me I wasn't cut out to be a soldier. And you know how I got through them after that? Didn't even watch em- I just kept picturing your smile, kept thinking about holding your hand that night we set off the fireworks, when the others weren't paying attention, and it was just the two of us standing there, and I was so nervous I could barely even hang on, my hand was so Hyne-damned sweaty. I never told you that; wasn't sure you'd remember it, so I kept it to myself, because I always liked to think you did…I liked to think that even with all the junctioning and the years in between, that little moment stuck with you somehow, you know? _

_Sometimes when I'm out on that battlefield, I hope the next round takes off my head, so I can see you again. I know I ain't supposed to say that, but it's true. Every night there's this empty space next to me where you're supposed to be, and sometimes it's all I can do to get up in the morning, that's how bad it hurts. Maybe if I could…if I could just see you again, it wouldn't hurt so bad. I've thought about askin Ellone to send me back again, so many times you don't even know, Selphie…and then I can't do it, cause I'm a coward, cause I know if I see you again, there's no way I'll be able to stand coming back here, where you're not, where there's an empty half of the bed that's cold, and…_

_Man, I'm sitting here crying like a little baby, and it's smearing everything, and you know, if I'd a known when I was a kid where this was all heading, what it was really like to be a soldier, that being a soldier's got nothing to do with being brave or cool or untouchable, I'd never have done it._

_I'd have run away with you back when we were kids. I'd have taken care of you, Selphie. We coulda' lived in the woods like some of those stories Matron used to tell us, coulda' found an old tower or a cave or something and just lived there the rest of our lives, because it wouldn't have mattered to me where I ended up calling home, long as you were there. _

_I wanted us to have a life together. Know I never really told you that, but I sorta had this plan…I was going to start saving up all the gil from my missions, put it aside until I had a good down payment on a ring, and then I was going to take you to that little place down by the harbor, you remember the one with the balcony right on the ocean? Wanted to make it all romantic- propose at sunset or something, cept I'd a probably been so nervous I just blurted it out before we even got to dessert. _

_And then you got taken from me. And you know, for a long time I felt like railing against the world, telling it just how damn horrible it really was, how unfair everything was, how you were the one person who least deserved to go down like that…and then one morning I woke up, and it still hurt, it hurt so much darlin, but I suddenly realized I could get out of bed. I suddenly realized I had friends waiting for me to come back to them and a life you'd have wanted me to go out and live, and for a long time it was the hardest thing I ever did, putting one foot in front of the other- still is, some days. But I want to think you're out there somewhere, that you're waiting for me- but I figure until then, you want me to be happy, you want me to go on even if it's without you- you want me to keep going because I got people who care about me, because someone's gotta watch out for Dincht's stupid ass and make sure Quisty doesn't beat herself up too hard over stuff she can't change, and pull the stick out of Squall's butt once in a while. _

_He lost Rinoa too, and maybe neither one of us talks about it, maybe neither one of us really says anything because he stiff upper lips it like that anyway and sometimes I just can't talk about you, but I think there's sort of this silent thing there…sorta an understanding between the two of us, and somehow it helps. Kinda nice to not be all alone. _

_I hope…wherever you are right now, you're not alone either. _

_Love,_

_Irvine_


	4. Chapter Two

**A/N: MY BAD. This was supposed to be up earlier in the week, but I was off cheating on FF VIII with FF VII and this Reno one-shot that wouldn't leave my head. I did miss these guys a lot, though. **

**Dee-while I greatly appreciate your enthusiasm, please don't encourage me. I just MIGHT blow everyone up, knowing me.**

**nemurustar-Is it bad that I was a little happy I made you cry? I just wanted to see if I could still convey emotion through letters alone, and I'm very glad to see I've done that with you at least. As for everyone else, I think I've already got you guys in PMs, but if I missed someone I'm sorry-each and every one of your reviews are very, very appreciated, trust me. **

**And uh...remember how I said I was going to write a little more slowly this time around? This document is already over 51,000 words in Microsoft Works. Oopsie. Oh well.**

**Chapter Two**

Balamb Garden

Balamb

_Her face is a black hole gape, smiling at him. _

_He can feel an ice water trickle in his bowels and heart and throat and _how is she smiling at him_ there's nothing there but a melting Time Compression blur of midnight black and gray fog smear-_

_The ballroom that materializes around her is a blood-streaked haze and her finger hooks a teasing little beckon that makes him stumble forward like he is puppet Seifer with the strings hammered through his arms and legs and wooden jaw-clack of stiff jerking head movements that do not belong to him anymore-_

_His heart is a jackhammer pulse in his throat. His hands are sweat-smeared fists at his sides, painfully tight, and he is staggering forward another step, he is falling and her smile is still an interstellar nothing reaching out to swallow him-_

_There is a hand on his arm. _

_"Don't move, Squall." _

_It's a small hand, pale and scar-scattered and tipped in crazed-paint peach-_

_And it is sliding along his forearm, down his wrist to one sweat-smeared fist, and now those scar-scattered fingers are inside his own, and suddenly he can breathe again. _

_He does not take another step forward. _

_"He's not your puppet, Rinoa. You can't treat him like this." _

_Her profile is flecked in chandelier spray that brings out her eyes, and there is a leather-crack of a strike that sends this thing that used to be the women he loved staggering backward-_

_And the hand that is wrapped up in his is suddenly gone, and he is turning turning turning, trying to find her again-_

* * *

><p>His bed is a knot of sweat-snarled covers around him, too warm.<p>

* * *

><p>He spent a long time dressing himself.<p>

First the pants, creased in flawlessly parallel pleats down the middle by someone with too much damn time on their hands, a little tight around the middle-he'd put on some muscle throughout his waist that strained the top button just slightly.

The jacket he slipped on over shoulders a little broadened since his days as a more slight cadet, shaking out the sleeves into ironed-perfect lines that ended just above his wrists.

He spent a long time staring down at the cuff links before doing them up with nerveless fingers.

Rinoa used to play with them while he fussed everything into place, smiling that little heady lip curl that made him want to skip the stupid ball and just stay holed up in his room the rest of the night, wrapped up in her hair and hands and lips with her arched underneath him sighing his name-

He took a long shuddering breath that did not pacify his stomach or the tangle of bile in his throat, and sat down on the corner of his bed with his face in his hands.

He could still see that starless smear of a face staring out at him from a red-splattered ballroom, twisting and blurring and running like paint down the floor-length sweep of her white-sparkling ball gown-

A knock on his door brought him back to his room, back to this spartan little box of a home that used to sound like her laugh, and he groped his fingers around to rub blindly at both eyes, sighing. "It's open."

Quistis poked her head in, smiling, and for just a moment something unclenched in his chest and came unraveled in his stomach and he could only sit there, staring.

"Ready?"

Squall blinked, coming to his feet and putting both hands awkwardly in his pockets, clearing his throat. He wondered if it sounded like he was hacking up a damn hairball, and he wanted to know when she had become so beautiful, when the sight of her had first become a low drum roll in his ears that was his heart reeling out of control, and he couldn't-

He couldn't follow this line of thinking.

He cleared his throat again. "No."

Quistis smiled again. "Just for a little while. We won't stay long-it's only for morale, anyway. These shoes are not something I want to spend the entire night in." She stepped forward to give his tie a quick twitch of an adjustment, her fingertips just grazing his collarbone, and he snapped his hand brusquely up to stop her.

"I've got it."

Her smile slipped a little.

"You look nice." It was a pathetic stutter of a compliment, and he thought about putting his own face through the wall for being such a fumbling idiot. He sounded like his damn father now.

Seifer had never stuttered talking to her.

He held his arm wordlessly out to her, and she slipped hers through it.

He took a deep steadying hiss of a breath, and the slight tightening of her fingers on his bicep brought everything swirling back into focus, this room with its lingering ghosts of nightmares and lavender-scented bath products and warped Time Compression smears of faces that watched from behind breath-smoked plastic-

And something inside of him untwisted, just a little.

He let his lips twitch in a hint of a smile when she wasn't looking.

* * *

><p>Dancing with Quistis was an entirely different experience from spinning Rinoa around the floor. For one, she was taller; Rinoa had reached just above his chin and Quistis stood nearly eye to eye with him. Their lips were a scant quarter inch shy of flawless alignment-and why the <em>hell <em>was he noticing that anyway?

Secondly, she did not possess the self-assured lack of discomfiture Rinoa had always been more than happy to display in the direct center of the dance floor, where everyone could see them-something that had, of course, disagreed with Squall's natural inclination to glare everyone into leaving him the hell alone. She knew every step and glide and graceful pirouette that he had found necessary to learn during his years of dating Rinoa and could now perform perfectly, but she was clearly more than happy to execute them at the very outer fringes of the crowd, where few people even noticed.

He didn't mind.

He did mind the way her graceful little hand in his felt very soft and smooth and brittle, like this rank A SeeD in his arms, this cold-steel woman with a right hook like a side swipe of arachnid-jointed X-ATM limb might shatter inside the humps of old breaks and keloid ripples that were his soldier's hands-

And he had to look away.

He had to slip his fingers from hers into fists along his sides, and this entire ballroom, all its shining chandelier-reflected decorations and laughing whirlwinds of soldiers twirling soldiers, of children who might be dead in another day or week or month-

It all began to slide out from underneath him, just slightly.

"Squall?" Quistis touched his arm gently. "Did you hear me?"

"I…yeah."

"I can have a formal request to you later this evening. I've already filled out the proper forms. Esthar needs the assistance. If they press their advantage now, there's a good chance the last of the Galbadians can be driven from the city. I've read reports that estimate the siege could be over in as little as a week, if we can supply the numbers. I believe I can competently command Squad D-and I admit I'm getting a little tired of administrative work." She smiled ruefully.

She did not mention Seifer, who had returned to the front lines three days ago and was the real reason behind her desire to dirty her hands some more.

He could deny her. Nida had gratefully stepped down from (begged out of) his position as Garden's commander, which put Squall right back where he'd started, and therefore more than within his rights to assign someone else Squad D. She might be less than pleased-she might give him that icy little stare that had intimidated so very many students and enemies alike, but in the end she was just another cog in the machine-an efficient, important one, but a cog nonetheless.

He shoved his hands into his pockets, frowning. "Quistis, I…need you here."

"Xu is more than capable of assisting with administrative duties. If this final battle lasts longer than expected, you can replace me, but I'm sure you can get by for a week without my help. I'm one of Garden's most experienced tacticians, Squall; you know that."

He did. He also knew she might end up a sheet-draped pile on a battlefield somewhere, limply red-stained.

Seifer would murder any Galbadian soldier who had so much as breathed in her direction during her final moments, and then he'd come after Squall. And maybe Squall despised him, maybe he still entertained blood-smeared fantasies of putting Seifer's head through a wall, of smashing open his smug asshole face with the business end of Lionheart-

But neither would he really be able to blame him.

Once, he'd wanted to burn the whole damn world down for the woman he loved, just to keep her safe. Once there had been something bright and smoldering and all-consuming in the soundless echoic void that was his chest, and maybe he didn't get it, maybe he would never for one single moment understand how Seifer Almasy of all people had come to feel it-

But he could recognize that it existed, that ex-knight Seifer Almasy, self-serving traitor Almasy would tear apart everything he had worked toward for the last three years with his bare hands if it meant saving Quistis. SeeD and the tentative alliance forged between those who had fought and lived and lost in the Second Sorceress War and even his inexplicable friendship with Zell-none of these things mattered beside this woman Squall kept trying not to look at, this woman he had underappreciated and rebuffed and hurt so very, very nonchalantly-

This woman who used to be an almost-sister, who was now beginning to unfold into a starburst of cataclysmic understanding inside him.

This woman who smelled like vanilla and curved in all the places Rinoa had only sort of protruded, one hand on his arm and a smile on her lips, and he couldn't-

He _couldn't _let her go-he had _already _let go of one woman he loved-

Squall stood blinking off into chandelier-fractured reflections of dancing couples and drunk cadets and giggling civilian dates surreptitiously hitching up skirts, and his hands in his pockets came up holding fistfuls of soft detergent-scented liner.

He-

He didn't-

He shut his eyes, very slowly. "Get me the paperwork. I'll sign off on it."

She was smiling at him again, and he smothered a cough in the palm of his hand that tasted like bile.

He did not return her smile as she reached out her hands for the next dance.

* * *

><p>"<em>Charge<em>!"

An octagonal whirl of silver-flashing blades honed as fucking razors took out part of his bicep, and the motherfucker wielding the shuriken like it was his first fistful of tit left an opening a mile wide; Seifer stabbed him through the heart.

A quarter turn flick of his wrist painted his battlefield snarl bright red, and beside him Zell cracked something inside a man's chest that sent him screaming to both knees, vomiting.

"We got 'em, man! They're retreating!"

"They're _falling back_, asshole," Seifer yelled, bringing Hyperion up and around in a neat one-handed blow that sprayed fresh blood from the arm that cocksmoker had maimed. His fucking dominant one, too; if the guy wasn't already a bloody death-reeking heap at his feet he'd have kicked out his goddamned teeth.

He cast Cure awkwardly on his arm-healing spells required a particularly delicate balance of raw power and gentle precision that he'd always been shit at-and just barely ducked a blade that came whistling past overhead.

"_Shit_! Wuss, you wanna' fucking cover me?"

His friend spun to deliver a backfist that sent the dickhead now attempting to skewer his kidney flailing backward, coughing up what Seifer hoped were several broken teeth. Seifer kicked him in the head for good measure as he shifted Hyperion to his off hand, rolling his right shoulder cautiously.

Zell brought himself hip to hip with Seifer, angling himself out slightly. "Eh, what's the difference between retreating and falling back anyway? We're beating them."

"Falling back means they're re-grouping to come at us again." He brought the wrist of his left hand up across his mouth, smearing blood from his lips. "And I need to get through that spot where they're all huddling trying not to shit themselves right now." He indicated a snarl of mud-caked soldiers bristling with smoking rifles and dripping blades and fist-dented arcs of helmet, fanned out in a scrambling semi-circle just a few feet away.

Zell's jaw unrolled in a beached fish flap that Seifer poked casually with a finger, trying to prod it back into place. "Huh? You wanna' go right through their front line? What the hell for?"

"That asshole's supposedly back there somewhere-former vice president and all-around dickhead? I'm going to kill him." He'd gotten Raijin and Fujin killed after all, and for that Seifer was going to reach his bare fucking hand down the bastard's throat, and pull up anything he could reach.

"Whoa-no way. Look, ok, like, I get that you wanna' kill him-I don't blame you, but wait until the entire Galbadian army's not between him and you, huh? Quisty'll kill me if I let you do that."

Seifer peeled his lips off a smile he felt all the way down into the tips of his fucking toes, tingling like orgasm aftershock. Tearing through the entire Galbadian army-through the entire goddamned _world_-to reach that prick sounded just goddamned fine to him. Fuck, more than fine-it kindled something hot and burning and motherfucking _alive _in his chest, something that felt an awful lot like all those old romantic dreams of wedging his bootheel up against the throat of the whole goddamned planet, and not letting up until it promised to never forget him.

Nobody was going to forget this, either.

He saluted Zell with Hyperion, pivoted, and took off at a dead sprint for that snarl of mud-caked soldiers blinking blankly at him now like he was something they did not quite understand, could not completely comprehend, and his gunblade carved a slanting blood-soaked diagonal down through the shoulder and out through the hip of the first before the rest even caught on to what was happening. The squeal of his blade hanging up on that armor-plated knurl of hip bone vibrated all the way up his arm to his shoulder, and he chambered for a front kick that peeled the man off Hyperion with another porcine shriek that hurt his ears.

Galbadian soldiers were stupid as fuck, with few exceptions. He'd noticed that while working with them during the Second Sorceress War; G. Garden cadets weren't half-bad, for the most part, but the rest of the army was a bunch of window-licking fuckwits who'd forgotten to strap their helmets down, good for putting warm bodies on a field and not much else. Still, there were a shit fucking ton of them, and even witless assholes could score some damage, you got enough of them together in one place.

He smashed himself an opening he bowled through like a freight train, getting in a couple of hits with Hyperion that spun heads and red-leaking fists severed at the wrist around him like flops of tide-deposited fish. The one asshole with a big enough sack to meet him head-on brought his rifle around to bear, and Seifer elbowed him in the throat hard enough to turn him an entire three-hundred-sixy degree flip that slammed him flat on his back, wheezing. Zell slipped through the breach Seifer had opened right on his heels, slamming together helmets and side kicking knee caps that gave way with wet pops of tendon tear that folded soldiers shrieking to their knees, and together they reached the vacant stretch of roadway that was the last obstacle between them and the small Galbadian encampment up ahead.

"Let's fuck their day up; I can see some radios and munitions crates from here. I've got a couple fire spells still junctioned; we can torch the whole thing."

"Nah; you're shit at magic. Besides." Zell held up a couple of grenades he'd snagged off a dead soldier, and grinned. "These'll make a bigger boom."

"You know, Wuss, there are times I think you're a man after my own heart, and if you didn't physically repulse me, I'd consider making you a very happy man." He paused to take the grenade Zell handed him, sliding Hyperion back into its sheath. "Actually, nah; I'd still rather fellate Save the Queen while violently fisting Squall than spend half a second even looking at that shriveled up peanut you call a dick."

Zell scowled, yanked his pin, and threw. "Man, you had to put that mental image in my head, didn't you?"

The encampment ahead of them became a fireball that stretched flicks of red-orange tongue toward the sky.

Shouting Galbadians began to issue from tents not yet spread in ragged smears of black-burned nylon across the ground, and Seifer brought his half-healed arm up through a loop of overhand that pulled his shoulder hard enough to shoot stars across his eyes. His grenade rolled an aftershock of heart-thundering groundquake underneath his feet that hammered his knees into blood-streaked pavement, tearing his pants at the shin.

Zell kept his feet somehow-the little fucker was nimble as hell-and he hauled Seifer back up by the elbow, his hands coming into blood-streaming balls that gaped at the knuckle and flaked at the wrist where he'd stalled a fire spell earlier.

Seifer pulled Hyperion.

He hoped these assholes were ready for them; he wanted a real goddamned fight this time.

* * *

><p>Standing in the center of flame-belching whirls of devil-horned apparitions and glass-shatter sprays of glacial-gleaming columns blowing apart, it is hard for her to ignore the hollowness of her veins.<p>

From expert Blue Magic user to impotent little Quistis Trepe one-handing her weapon with casually professional flick flick flicks of wrist snap that take out an eye a throat a leg-

She is standing in the center of a whirlwind, a multi-colored twister that flares Fira orange and pale Blizzaga blue and everything around her is a jumbled screaming knot of ozone-reeking death that goes shrieking to its knees or folds gurgling at the throat. There is no more blood-stench or bowel-emptied stink because the only thing she can see and smell and _taste _is the singed-ozone smell that buzzes in her head and down through her teeth out into her jaw and her veins sputter feeble gasps of memory that feel like jabs of claw, trying to yank her apart-

Something is wrong-her head _hurts_-

She takes a knee in the excrement-oozing loops of a man's guts, and she does not even notice.

She is on _fire _in this epicenter of magic that keeps spinning and twisting and spiraling up into night-painted skies around her and her whip is a rattlesnake coil on the ground beside her-

There is a man at her elbow, touching her shoulder.

His face is a flickering spell-washed tangerine that hangs up in the trench of his forehead scar, and a hazy blood-smeared blink brings him into focus.

When did she get blood in her eyelashes?

"Quistis? Are you ok?"

She is not quite sure how to answer this. Her smile is a feeble twist that does not fool him at all; she can tell by the look on his face.

He helps her wordlessly back to her feet, and his hand on her arm lingers longer than she feels is strictly necessary. Her knees are shivering wood-block lumps of numbness underneath her, and perhaps she was wrong, perhaps she still needs his hand after all because she is sliding back down into that feces-smeared pavement and there is an entire thunderstorm inside her head and her chest-

Squall loses his sweaty white-knuckled grip on Lionheart to catch her. "Quistis?"

Her hands become gnarled twists of claw in his sleeves.

She gathers her breath for one final drill seargent roar as he holds her, and she has to keep blinking up at that spell-splashed sky, trying to hang on. "Keep casting! Swing around to flank them on the right! Close ranks, Squad D!"

Her head has gone rag-doll floppy against his shoulder.

It is a nice shoulder, warm and solid, and her head thumps solidly echoing across it and the frown on his brow is a scowl on his lips now and the entire world is spinning spinning spinning out from underneath her-

He sheathes Lionheart and gathers her up into his arms, and suddenly her head is clearing, suddenly she can see and hear and think things that are not glass-shatter sprays of glacial-gleaming column blowing apart again, and the hand he has molded loosely around Save the Queen becomes a knuckle-creaking clench against sweat-smudged handle.

She twists herself from his arms, and lands with a _clop _of both boot heels on cracked roadway.

He is still frowning. "You ok?"

She sends her whip billowing through three test swings to make sure; front snap, side snap, side snap, and she is ready to go again, impenetrable SeeD Trepe with the cold-steel eyes.

"Yes. I'm not sure what happened. I suppose I just got dizzy for a second."

It is not dizziness, and it is not the first time this has happened, but she does not tell him this.

She skirts that epicenter of magic that tries, for just a moment, to pull her under again, to send her staggering to her knees while he is watching, and she slams herself up against the solid wall of blue-armored enemy that is beginning to thin and fracture along the edges.

They break apart underneath her.

* * *

><p>Quistis wiped blood from her glasses with a sigh. They were always the first casualties of war; it was a hindrance to wear them at all, really, but she couldn't kill an enemy if they were only a shapeless smear in front of her, and she'd learned her lesson about wearing contacts into battle when a piece of exploded Grat embedded itself underneath one of them and nearly blinded her. Selphie had spent almost an entire hour trying to help her fish it out without poking her in the eye, with varying degrees of success.<p>

Across from her on an empty overturned crate Squall sat wiping down Lionheart, a little frown on his face that puckered up his scar twisting his lips into a tight thin line.

Quistis swung Save the Queen up across her knees and set to doing the same with a scrap of her SeeD uniform, eyeing it with no small measure of grief before running it down the whip's blood-soaked barbs. She hated sewing; patching her SeeD uniform after a battle was a particularly grating pet peeve of hers. She had never been exceptionally craftsy, never having had much time for home ec classes in between learning how to kill a man, and Seifer of course was no help-he had neither the patience nor the delicate dexterity necessary to hand stitch anything. His attempts usually began with a string of expletives that made her nudge the door of her dorm room shut just in case any new cadets still in possession of their innocence happened to wander past, and ended the same way.

She frowned down at Save the Queen. She did not particularly want to think about him right now; the nine-month-long siege of Esthar city was beginning to sputter out at last, reduced to just a few bloody knots of skirmish here and there, but the past hour or so had seen numerous casualty reports trickling in, and neither side had made out particularly well. Galbadia had taken the brunt of the damage, but the Estharan army and the SeeDs who had flown in to assist them had sustained heavy losses, worn thin after months and months of attacks. The G-Army did not have the tactical intelligence of either the Estharans or the elite mercenary force supporting them, but they did have numbers B. Garden simply could not provide, and the sheer volume of damage they had inflicted became clear now as cadets shuffled in and out handing reports to Squall or to Quistis, for those who were too intimidated to approach Garden's stoically unwelcoming commander.

Quistis watched him set aside Lionheart and sit with one of those reports across his knees in place of his gunblade, frowning. She had not seen his face take on any other expression in months now, and a little gnawing ache chewed a hole through her gut as she thought of Rinoa. The pretty dark-haired woman had somehow always known how to make him smile; Quistis of course was utterly useless in this regard, not being entirely sure how to even make herself smile, some days.

He wasn't even supposed to be here; she had spent a solid hour arguing with him over the wisdom of bringing Garden's leader into the very thick of the fighting and only eventually acquiesced when the look on his face became a painful smasm of an expression that clenched her chest like a fist around her heart; he was sick of sitting around, sick of sending his friends and underclassmen off to war and death and disfigurement while he himself sat safely behind his desk, filling out paperwork. It was not a sentiment she could really counter, and he'd expended more passion articulating it than she'd ever seen him disaplay before.

And so she had given up; she had let him become a soundless looming shadow at her side, keeping enemies at bay with blinding slashes of parries and thrusts and dexterous backswipes of counterstrike, spraying death all around them. He did not fight like Seifer; Squall's attacks were not flashy or overt or glory-seeking the way Seifer's had always been as a cadet and even beyond. He expended precisely the amount of exertion necessary to defeat an enemy and moved on, gutting and decapitating and throat-slitting like an automaton, like he really was just one more barcode-stamped piece of commerce rolled off the line. He did not have to be re-directed, to be reined in from a fight he did not need to start in the first place, and fighting next to him was a breath of fresh air. Seifer beside her was a constant nagging terror inside her heart, always three steps ahead of her trying to pick a fight with the entire damn front line-she aged a decade every time he smashed himself into clusters of soldiers ten and twenty deep with that exuberant little war whoop she remembered from a long ago beach.

An Estharan general approached with a salute, helmet tucked under his arm and dry-flaking blood cracking in the smile he offered both Quistis and Squall. "Commander Leonhart. SeeD Trepe; we have confirmation that Galbadia is pulling out of the city, effective immediately. A full retreat is under way right now. Some members of Squad C from Balamb Garden broke through the front lines into one of the Galbadian encampments and damaged vital communications equipment in addition to several caches of munitions the G-Army was planning on being able to fall back on during this final assault."

Quistis' stomach coiled into a tight little ball. "Where is Squad C now?"

Graveness wiped the smile from his face. "Squad C sustained heavy casualties; I don't have any concrete confirmations yet, but it sounds as though we lost most of them."

There was a sudden roaring in her ears that drowned out the words he turned to direct to Squall, and she saw her friend's head come up through a slow careful nod that brought his eyes up from the fist-crumpled report in his hand to her own.

He stood up as the general left with one final crisply-executed arc of a salute.

The fist-crumpled report in his hand fluttered down to become a mud-splotched rumple on the ground.

"Quistis," he said quietly, taking an awkward shuffling step forward that she halted with a hand turned palm out, shaking.

"I'm all right," she assured him in a grief-tight voice that made him slide both hands into his pockets, his blue eyes steadily unblinking, and inside her chest something gave a sharp bone-shatter twist that felt like everything coming undone.

She staggered off to be alone with one hand over her mouth and the other against her stomach, breathing in little choked-off gasps that did not sound at all like Rank A SeeD Trepe with the coldly imperious look that could send a man's balls running for cover.

* * *

><p>Zell slammed the door to his hospital room hard enough to make Seifer jump, smacking his head back against the wall with a hollow little <em>thock <em>that made his eyes swim like drunken fucking fish. He brought one IV-taped hand up to rub the sore spot, scowling, and Zell heaved a duffel bag onto the end of the bed, guffawing loudly.

"Do you mind entering the room like a normal person for once? You almost gave me a fucking heart attack. And what the hell are you giggling about?"

"They wouldn't let anyone in to see you unless they were family, right? So I told them I was your wife and threw this big shitstorm about equal rights and how they had no right to judge our love and that I was gonna' bring their ethics committee down on their asses if they didn't let me in to see you. It was funny as hell; they finally just let me in here to shut me up."

Seifer sat blinking up at him, bringing his hand slowly back down to the stiff-starched bedcovers layering the Frankenstein patchwork of his stitched-together body, barely holding on in some places. "Why didn't you just tell them you were my brother?"

"Huh? Oh, yeah." He scratched his head. "Guess that woulda' worked too. Anyway, I brought you some stuff." He nudged the duffel bag and slumped down in a chair across from the bed, giving it a shove that squealed its wheels across mirror-polished linoleum like a goddamned knife in Seifer's ear.

He clenched his jaw. "Are you _kidding _me? What, I have to make fucking kissy face with you now to keep them from kicking you out? My goddamned _wife_? Where's your fucking helmet, you asshole?"

"Dude, calm down. Just, like, pat me on the ass or something if they walk by. Or I could read you some poetry I wrote for Ellone."

He sneered. "And ruin your debut?"

"Shut up; she's already heard it."

"No she hasn't. Unless your balls dropped sometime in the last blissfully Wuss-free couple of hours."

Zell brought his knees up against his chest and reached out with a hand to push off the wall, rotating the chair in a spin that made Seifer dizzy just watching it. "Ok, fine, ya' jerk, she hasn't heard it. But I'm _going _to read it to her, ok?"

"No you're not."

Zell scowled. "Yes, I _am_."

"I thought you wanted to try and trick her into going out with you? Because Hyne knows that's the only way a woman's actually going to date you. If you start rattling off that shit to her, she's going to hang herself. I would."

"That's 'cause you're an _asshole_. Ellone'll like it. I'm positive."

"That's because you're retarded."

"Hey, shut up!"

Seifer levered himself upright on an elbow, looking down at the IV line in his arm with a frown. "Look, Wuss, you get me out of here and _I'll _suck your dick. There's this beast of a nurse coming back in half an hour to give me a goddamned sponge bath, and I swear to _Hyne _I'll fucking kill myself if she gets her sweaty man hands on me."

"You're in the hospital for a reason, you know." Zell laced his hands behind his head with a smile.

Seifer was going to punch it off his face as soon as he struggled free of this fucking bed. "I've got some minor burns and a dislocated shoulder which they already popped back into place, and a concussion a fucking baby could survive. I don't need to be here."

His friend crossed both feet at the ankle and began to bob them up and down, humming. "I dunno, man. I'm probably too _retarded _to be any help to you. Sides, I heard that nurse you're talking about going on about how excited she is for the whole sponge bath thing, and I don't wanna' be the jerk that takes that away from her."

"_Zell_!" Seifer hissed, swinging his legs over the side of the bed and ignoring the corresponding lurch in his head, one hand coming up to his forehead like if he just clutched the damn thing hard enough he could keep his brain from slamming up against his skull like it was his fucking heart in his throat.

Footsteps outside in the hallway shot his friend from his chair with an excited "Here she comes!" that forced Seifer swaying to his feet, his fingers tightening around the railing on the bed. "Man, this is gonna' be good. Got my phone with me this time, so I can take pictures and everything."

"I'll _fucking kill you_."

"You don't mean that, Pooky!" Zell squealed.

The nurse that poked her head in the door-thankfully not the sweaty she-beast with the voice that made Seifer sound like a cringing little girl in comparison-gave them both an odd look and pushed the door open wide enough to admit the woman standing beside her, features coolly composed and both arms crossed over her chest. "Mr. Almasy, your…other wife is here."

"Yo! Quisty!" Zell trotted across the room to greet her as the nurse hurried away, and Seifer let himself sag heavily back down to the bed as she brought her glare up and around from Zell's face to find his.

Wuss was apparently too fucking stupid to notice the murderous rage on her face, but Seifer did, and his balls made a strategic little retreat for cover, pulling themselves back as far as they could go.

She did not return the embrace Zell looped around her shoulders, and he stepped back with a frown.

"Instructor. Fancy meeting you here." He gave her a little smile that only made her lips pinch together more tightly, and she took a brisk little _click _of a step forward that made him cringe back against the bed, just slightly. Well, it wasn't like he'd expected her to throw herself sobbing into his arms, raining little fucking chick flick kisses across his face-but goddammit he _hurt_, and they hardly ever saw each other, and just for fucking _once _couldn't she fold her arms around him, tell him she was glad to see him-fucking _anything_?

Seifer looked away with a scowl. Maybe his balls didn't need to worry about hiding themselves away-clearly he didn't have any.

"What the hell did you think you were doing, Seifer Almasy?"

"Uh…" Zell eased himself nervously behind Quistis, angling for the door. "Maybe I should go. I mean, she used the full name, so I'm thinkin' you're in big trouble-"

"Stay," Quistis ordered coldly, motioning him back toward the chair he had vacated to greet her.

"Yeah, ok."

Seifer wanted to turn a sneer in his friend's direction, to make a derisively nasty comment about faggots who couldn't face the heat-

But frankly he was too scared himself to think up a single legitimate crack, so instead he just sat there, keeping his mouth the hell shut, glaring past her toward the door she pushed closed behind her.

Probably so no one would find their grisly murdered bodies until long after she'd made her escape.

"You directly disobeyed orders, assaulted the G-Army's front line _alone_, breached a Galbadian campsite crawling with soldiers again _alone_-"

"Hey, I helped too," Zell cut in.

Quistis swung her rage-smoking glare around to face him, and he shrank flinching backward in his chair, sneaking a sidelong glance at Seifer. "Uh, I mean, I didn't have anything to do with it. It was all him. In fact, he uh…kidnapped me! Yeah. Seifer kidnapped me and I told him all along, I said 'Look dude, Quisty's not gonna' like this and it's a stupid idea and I'm not gonna' go along with it, so if you want to be an idiot you're going to have to do it by yourself.'"

"So you left him all alone behind enemy lines?"

Zell shifted uncomfortably in his chair, shooting another look at Seifer; fat fucking chance there-the little asshole had already turned traitor, and Seifer wasn't about to handjob him back into Quistis' good graces. "Uh…no?"

"The two of us took out half the army's radio equipment. And lived. Say 'good job,' Instructor."

Shit; he should have known better than to open his mouth. Now her eyes had snapped back around to him. "Wuss tried to leave me behind when I took a hit."

"What? No I didn't, you asshole! Quisty, he's lying-_I'm _the one who called in help and got him air lifted to the hospital-"

"He said he was gonna' leave me and then come home all teary-eyed to comfort you, and that you'd be 'ripe for the picking' and he'd finally lose his virginity. Exact quote," Seifer told her, keeping his face perfectly straight as Zell sputtered red-faced in the background.

"Wha…? No I didn't, you fucking _turd_!"

Quistis sighed, pinching the bridge of her nose. "Stop. Both of you. This is getting ridiculous. Zell, I am well aware you did not say those things. But both of you should have known better than to attempt an assault on an enemy camp alone. What you did was unforgivably stupid and you are both incredibly lucky to even be alive."

"Unforgivably?" Seifer rotated his sore arm through a long slow revolution that stretched the kinks from his shoulder. "Even if I-" He broke off and glanced over at Zell. "Wuss, cover your ears; this kind of conversation's for adults only." He turned back to Quistis. "Even if I do that one thing with my tongue that you like?"

Quistis turned bright red, tucking a loose-hanging strand of hair self-consciously behind one ear and looking away from him toward Zell, who had his face wrinkled up like Pubes giving birth to another fucking emo face.

"Get dressed. I'm having you discharged from the hospital into the care of B. Garden; there are far more severely injured soldiers that need this room, now that the doctors are sure you don't have any permanent damage from the blow you took directly assaulting an X-ATM." Her nose crinkled disapprovingly.

Seifer smiled up at her and wriggled the fingers of his right hand. "One-handed."

"Ok, so…yeah, that was kinda' impressive. I mean, compared to all the other shit Almasy does."

"Comparatively stupid, maybe," Quistis snapped, not looking impressed in the least.

"Instructor, I'm really hurt; I did it for you. So that it wouldn't be out there wandering around in the world, waiting for you-I did it all to protect my beloved former instructor."

"Your 'beloved former instructor' believes you are full of crap," she told him coolly. "Get dressed."

Seifer stood up with an arch of his back that cracked his spine, and Zell looked away with one hand over his face.

"Ah, man, your gown's open in the back."

"Shouldn't you be appreciating the view, you know, as my _wife_? Fucking idiot."

"I don't even want to know the story behind that," Quistis murmured.

"It's pretty simple, actually. Wuss is a goddamned moron, and I'm irresistible."

Quistis pursed her lips. "Mm hmm." She gave a little shake of her head that flipped loose strands of blonde from the tightly-clipped fishtail of her neat updo, and crossed both arms. "Just get dressed."

He stood up and loosened the ties of his hospital gown, letting it slither off his shoulders and down his arms to puddle in a loose medicinal-reeking pile at his feet.

Seifer propped both hands on his hips and let her get an eyeful of everything, his smirk peeling up off his teeth into a full shit-eating grin as she turned away with the discreet palm-muffled cough she used to try and cover her embarrassment. Almost nine months of fucking like rabbits and she still blushed like a virgin the moment he whipped it out. It was goddamned endearing-stone-cold soldier Quistis with the fucking ice in her eyes and Seifer Almasy pussy-whipped at her feet, flushed with humiliation because he flashed a little dick. Somewhere underneath it all, this Rank A warrior with the death-stained hands who sent students to bloody shit-smeared demises, was blue-eyed little Quisty, turning red because that asshole cowboy had let it slip that Seifer thought she was pretty.

He liked the glimpses he still caught of her every so often. Because if she was still around, if that little doe-eyed blonde had not been ground out beneath the fucking boot heel that was Garden, smudging out everything it didn't need in hire-for-profit mercenaries that used to be children laughing on a beach-

Then boy Seifer with the stick sword and the smile he could only just barely remember some days was not gone either.

Zell made a beeline for the exit. "If you're gonna' be swinging wang around, I'm gone, man." The door thudded noisily shut behind him.

Seifer pulled his hands from his hips and spread them out before him. "Like what you see?"

Quistis rolled her eyes toward the ceiling. "Just get dressed, please. You've already traumatized Zell. I think your work here is finished for the moment."

He stretched his lips into a smile he knew she would recognize from the back of her classroom. "Actually, I can think of something I'd like to 'finish…' or that I'd really like you to finish, anyway."

"As intellectually stimulating as I find oral sex jokes, we're taking up room unnecessarily. There are other patients waiting to be seen. We took heavy losses." For just a moment he thought he heard her voice waver, a little hesitant hitch that brought his head up from the pile of flame-singed uniform he had begun to distastefully unfold, eyes narrowing. Goddamned thing still smelled like smoke and blood, but it wasn't like he had anything else lying around to change into, and he wasn't ruining his can't-keep-me-down-fuckers swagger by strutting out of here with his ass hanging out the back of a hospital gown.

He kept his eyes on her face until she brought her gaze up to meet his at last, pulling his pants carefully up over both stitched-together legs. "You ok?"

"Yes," she said immediately. "Just tired."

"Tch. You're so full of shit, Instructor. You thought some Galbadian asshole wiped me off the map, didn't you? You haven't yelled at me like that since that one time I broke Pubes' computer terminal with his face."

His reminder of that particular incident brought a glower to her face that puckered the skin between both eyebrows, a little trench of a wrinkle almost as disfiguring as his scar.

He smiled as he buckled his pants. "He tripped. I was trying to help him."

"You _pushed _him."

Seifer shrugged. "He started it." He reached for the plain white underarmor shirt he'd worn underneath his uniform top, ripped across the collar and smeared along the hem with what he hoped to Hyne damned hell was mud, and a tentative little boot click of a step forward stopped him dead.

His heartbeat went turbocharged as she brought her hand gently up to press little bloodless bands of finger-width white across his forearm.

The tight little smile that didn't reach her eyes felt like a fucking hand in his chest, squeezing. "I'm glad you came back, Seifer."

His throat clear twitched the lump from his throat back down into his gut and oiled the crack in his voice. "I'm always going to come back if you're waiting for me, Instructor."

She let her hand fall away and looped it through the other in a tidy little knot she placed between them, a little goddamned barrier that lit up his chest and forced his head into a calculatedly casual tilt that re-focused his eyes on the uniform he went back to unfolding. Maybe he'd made some out-of-line comments and accusations a couple of weeks ago, but she wasn't _still _fucking mad at him, was she?

Maybe she wasn't. Maybe she just preferred that robot-faced asshole and his twig dick after all. Maybe she was here to tell him it'd been a great fucking ride and she was glad he was all still in one piece and everything, but she and Squall fucking Leonhart were eloping to raise the love child she was carrying in legally-wedded bliss, and sorry things hadn't worked out between them after all, but what the hell had he expected anyway?

There was a smile in her voice as he yanked his shirt roughly over his head. "You get these little frown lines around your mouth whenever you're thinking about Squall, did you know that?" She reached up to touch them. "You don't have to be so jealous of him, you know."

"I'm not _jealous_ of that asshole-licking prick," he snapped.

"Really." Quistis arched an eyebrow. "Well, that's good to know. I was worried you might feel threatened by him, but I see that's not the case at all."

He glared at her through the collar of his shirt.

She sighed and stood on her tiptoes to kiss his chin, the first part of his face to emerge from that ragged circle of red-smeared white. "I'll meet you in the lobby. I've already taken care of all the discharge paperwork; the charge nurse seemed relieved I was doing it instead of you. Apparently you were not the most cooperative patient," Quistis added dryly. "Imagine that."

He tucked his shirt into his pants. "I've been a saint this whole time."

"Your definition of sainthood is far removed from my own then, if it includes demanding one of the nurses keep her 'nasty ham hocks' to herself."

"Did you _see _her fucking hands? She could rub me off with her pinky, and I'm basically a tree trunk."

"I am genuinely humbled by your modesty." Quistis made a grab for his fly that brought his heart thundering hopefully up against his ribcage, pushing the knotted-up fist that was all thoughts of Pubes from his chest.

"You're unzipped."

"I know. I didn't want you to have to do _all _the work. That would be selfish."

"I'll meet you in the lobby," she repeated firmly, and turned to leave.

"I meant what I said," he called out, keeping his eyes on his soot-streaked cuff like not looking at her would make them both forget how really fucking awful he was at being romantic. It wasn't like he'd had a whole lot of practice-most women had been lucky to get dinner out of him first, and mommy dearest certainly hadn't left a whole goddamned lot of sentimentality behind.

She stood with her hand on the door knob for a long, long time, that proud rigid shipmast of a back to him. "You better."

There was a smile in her voice that lit him up all the way down to his fucking toes.

* * *

><p><em>Time Compression's a gray smog-swirl all around him and inside his mouth his tongue scrapes a dry leather-withered streak across his teeth. <em>

_His mother is gone._

_Her laugh's still a skeletal leaf-slither hiss in his ears, though._

_Can't seem to get rid of the goddamned sound. _

_There are nails inside his mind that feel like talons, scratching up his brain. _

_He's been stumbling through this shit for a while, this steel-silvered fog-smear that hooks his skin like little fucking teeth and he's alone, he knows he's alone-he's a fetal-curled boy under his covers again because Quistis is gone-they are all gone and he is _alone_-_

_Except he keeps seeing these night-shadowed smears trailing tails of hazy human-shaped silhouettes, off in the distance- _

_And a salt-weighted blink tears crust from his eyes and narrows his focus to a bright blinding lucidity he hasn't felt in a long goddamned time-_

_And he can smell whip leather._

_It's a tangle of stale old memory in his nostrils, all jumbled up with blood and smoke-reeking fire magic chewing a long thin side scrape of burned-meat stink down his ribs-_

_The smoke-reek and nose hair singe of burned-meat stink are coming from a pile at his feet. _

_He is six and there is a monster in his closet and he doesn't want to look don't make him _look_, Matron-_

_His eyes are fog-stinging slits that show him his mother waiting for him behind knee-patched pants and hand-polished Mary Janes and tree-shredded sleeves of jackets and in her face her eyes roll flat black marble flickers of slow endless blink-_

_Her hair is a burned-away halo of blackened end-crisped streamers; there are just enough untouched strands left to tell him it used to be blonde._

_He is a messy sobbing heap at her head, trying to put her back together._

_His magic's not working, or he doesn't have any left; there's just a thin faucet-leak dribble of blue-white from his fingers that nets her like a spider web-_

_And then nothing. _

_She is nothing and he is nothing and together they're a brittle ash puff of a little girl and a frail skeleton boy trying to play on a beach that smells like blood-_

_And his mother is drowning them both, or this fog is drowning them, and his tears carve acid-etched trails down his face that make ragged clean-washed haloes on her cheeks-_

_She is smiling. _

_Her lips are black-flaking lumps that smell like summer barbeques on a beach and she is _smiling _at him and he is trying to slide her head into his lap, he is trying to let her know she is not alone-he is going to hold her hand as long as it takes-_

_Except her fingers crumble into little dust-smears of overdone meat stink under his and there's a long animal moan of a scream that scrubs his whole fucking throat raw before he realizes it belongs to him-_

_And her head goes up like a fucking torch._

_And the only thing he can do is huddle here watching flame-curled wisps of eyelashes twist away like fucking skeletons of dandelions, getting snot and tears and teeth-thinned blood all over his gloves-_

_There's a thin Firaga-flushed hand on his shoulder and that skeletal leaf-slither hiss is back in his ear, only it doesn't belong to his mother anymore-_

_"Where's Squall? I want to know where Squall is I need a knight Seifer she wouldn't tell me where he was don't you understand I'm sorry but I have to burn the children-"_

* * *

><p>The cowboy was still asleep when he snapped blindly panicking from his nightmare, and underneath him the exam room table gave a metal-shifting creak that nearly made him crap himself.<p>

Not that he was fucking twitchy, or anything.

He swung both legs over the side of the table and eased his feet down onto that night-chilled floor with one hand pressed to his temple and its rhythmic kettledrum pounding that felt a lot like one beer too many, coming back to haunt him.

He hadn't had a drink in weeks.

He let a slow shoulder-deflating hiss of a sigh through his teeth and peeled his eyes open long enough to see one slanting scab-patched cheekbone and decide he didn't really want his eyes open anyway. Or, at least not in that direction.

Hard to find something else half so interesting to look at in this unlit little hole that smelled like anesthetics and reminded him of training-bruised ribs and twisted ash-blistering stubs of cowboy boots, still smoldering.

Seifer brought his hand up to dig at the back of his neck, frowning.

He'd had to stumble around like a fucking idiot clutching his head and whining about non-existent dizziness, but that look the cowboy had given him, that quick I'm-all-right lip curl and even quicker glance away that wiped all the shit bravado from his face-

Seifer knew all about the fear of being alone.

He knew even more about being too scared to ask someone to stay.

So here he was, in this stupid fucking room on a blanket-layered exam table instead of Quistis' warmly welcoming bed with her even more warmly welcoming body beside him, faking a possibly severe concussion because some pretty-faced girl of a shit-useless soldier had gotten himself blown all to shit and Seifer didn't want him to be alone.

Somewhere along the way, he'd traded his balls for a conscience. He'd rather have his sack, thanks; Kinneas was pretty, but not nearly as nice to look at as Quistis, and he didn't have a whole hell of a lot to say right now. Not without Zell in the room, anyway; maybe the guy was a top-notch mercenary who could strangle a full-grown man in eight seconds flat, but he was such a babbling hopeful fucking moron no one had the heart to tell him the world wasn't one big shiny present waiting for him to open it.

Certainly no one had the heart to tell him Irvine Kinneas didn't give a shit about his cafeteria-smuggled hot dogs or his goddamned awful poetry or his last visit to Ma Dincht's and how much she couldn't wait to see them all again-

He just wanted to die.

He could tell Seifer that-it was exactly what he'd said earlier this evening when everyone cleared out to leave them lying silently side by side, breathing stale vent-recycled air that tasted like old meat. He was tired and every tiniest murmur of wheezing breath hurt and he just wanted to see _Selphie _again, and could Seifer understand that?

He sure as shit could, and no he wasn't going to fucking unplug Irvine's new lungs. Work yourself underneath Seifer Almasy's skin and you better just hold the hell on, because he had already lost his mother and his Posse and all his stupid fucking fairytale ambitions, and this man beside him with the Casanova wink and the laugh that tinkled like a little goddamned girl's was just going to have to find some way to deal with being alive.

Hyne knew he'd just barely scraped by for years, and no one had given a shit about him the way they did this soft-eyed sharpshooter who should have been a goddamned artist or a poet or a slick-smiling politician banging society women in five star hotels.

Lousiest fucking soldier he'd ever seen, and there'd been a kid along on his first SeeD exam that shot himself in the ass.

Seifer cracked an eye at him; a corner of blanket had come untucked around him, trailing limply along the side of his bed.

He stood up with a sigh, giving the bridge of his nose one last pinch.

He let his hands brush soundlessly up across that untucked blanket corner and molded it gently back around his friend, pulling it tight across his chest with another frown that hurt his head. Kadowaki had buzzed all the explosion-ruined hair from Kinneas' skull, leaving behind a short swept-back style that wasn't far off the one he'd worn for years; it made him look like a man at least, getting rid of that wussy little ponytail. Seifer had always wondered if that was supposed to be some sort of handlebar for the cowboy's boyfriend.

Irvine gave a long slow twitch that rustled the pillow underneath him, and Seifer punched it with a scowl, plumping it back up underneath his head. Maybe _he _was the goddamned boyfriend; he was sure as shit fussing over him enough.

He settled himself behind Kadowaki's empty desk and put his feet up on it, which would annoy the old hag almost as much as it had always incensed Quistis. Something about disrespect, or lack of discipline? She was always lecturing him about one of the two things. In one ear, out the other.

His eyes slid off Kinneas' pale pink-healing face and landed on a stack of folders piled neatly off to one side.

Well, looky here; _Quistis Marae Trepe _typed tidily across the uppermost file, a scant centimeter of page corner just peeking through the cream-colored lips of it. He swiped it off the stack, and snapped on the desk lamp as he flipped it open across a clipboard with a blank outline of the human body tacked to it.

Quistis had probably already told him about anything in this file, and if she hadn't, she should have. When you got right down to it, it wasn't really snooping; besides, maybe there was a tit picture from a female exam or something. Doctors took pictures of women's breasts for documentation purposes, right? Or maybe that was just the impression he'd been under-after all, why the hell else would any self-respecting man pursue a career that entailed discussing a woman's body and all the creepy monthly issues that came along with it? The last thing he'd want to do all day was sit around on his ass listening to some fat used-to-be MILF complaining about dryness. Or clotting, for Hyne's fucking sake-Rinoa had gone into unnecessary detail about that particular female problem once during lunch, and he'd nearly spewed all over the pink-painted café table she'd forced him to sit at.

Give him a puppy to kick or a baby to eat any day over listening to that disgusting shit.

He thumbed past the first couple of reports and stopped four in, sliding the file down his legs and into his lap.

**Name: Quistis Marae Trepe**

**DOB: 4/15/38**

**DOS: 2/9/60**

**Subjective: Pt. is complaining of severe headaches, dizziness and nausea when in close proximity to magic. Pt. suffered severe spell-burns a year ago that rendered her unable to stock. Pt. has not noticed any ill effects until recently; she describes disorientation and pain (burning or freezing sensations depending on class of magic being used nearby) in the presence of all magic, including GF summonings and draw points. **

**Past Medical History: Positive for gunshot wounds to the chest and abdomen, shrapnel to the right cheek, fracture of the left calcareous, fracture of the right and left scapula, fracture of the left ulna, spell-burns to the right and left forearm.**

**Medications: None currently.**

**Vital Signs: Blood pressure 117/76, pulse 70 BPM. Weight 127 lbs.**

**General: Pt. is in no acute distress. **

**ENT: Normal.**

**Neck: Normal; no masses or lumps can be palpitated.**

**Chest: Bilaterally clear to auscultation without any wheeze.**

**CVS: Regular S1 and S2 without murmurs, rubs or gallops.**

**Abdomen: No tenderness or distention. No masses felt. Bowel sounds are active.**

**Extremities: Lower extremities are symmetrical bilaterally, no edema.**

**Labs: No recent labs.**

**Clinical impression: **

**1. Disorientation/pain in relation to magic proximity. Symptoms have just recently begun and do not seem to be triggered by anything other than proximity to magic. **

**Plan: Observation only for now. I have never come across anything like this before and am not certain what pt. is experiencing. She will avoid junctioning and draw points and limit her exposure to magic as much as possible until I have had time to research this properly. I will consider putting her on something for the pain if it becomes an issue, but for now we will attempt to manage this conservatively. **

Seifer lowered Quistis' file and rubbed his forehead scar. She hadn't said a damn word about any of this.

He wondered if she'd mentioned it to Squall.

He went back to pinching the bridge of his nose, the ragged halo of lampglow spilling down his ankle-crossed legs and up over that cream-colored file in his hand hurting his fucking eyes. He shut them and rubbed the corner of one, scraping around something that felt like sand. An entire fucking beach full of the shit.

The hand supporting the file made a fist, and crumpled the spine of it into a sharp paper cut throb down his palm.

Irvine's head swung through a long slow turn that brought both burn-crinkled eyes up to meet his, and Seifer snapped the file closed with a spine-pop of a back arch that pulled him up straight. He really wished those long girl's eyelashes would grow the hell back-it was creepy as fuck trying not to stare at those flame-stunted nubs of hair, blinking up at him. The explosion had taken his eyebrows and most of that pretty little ponytail, leaving behind a dry-withered cinder of a man that looked a hell of a lot more vulnerable than Seifer was comfortable with.

His mother would have wanted him to crush Kinneas.

He transferred his boots from the desk to the floor.

His mother didn't have a fucking thing on him anymore, and this brittle flame-twisted stump of a man was his friend, somehow.

He didn't break his friends. Not after knowing what it felt like to be broken himself.

"What are you doing?" Terminal patient croak: that was his friend's voice now, and he wondered if he would ever get used to it. Kinneas was going to heal eventually; a couple more weeks under Kadowaki's patiently cautious eye and some intravenous Curaga drips and soon that brittle flame-twisted stump of a man would be back on his feet, a few more scars to show for it but probably still prettier than all the rest of them combined.

But for right now, for this moment that stretched into painful heart-thundering silence between them, he was a skin-flaking slab on a bed, staring up at Seifer through lashless bloodshot eyes that twitched little seizure flickers of eerie sleep-hazed blink.

He wished Zell were here; the guy was one long endless moron-babble of cafeteria escapades and poorly-rhyming poetry, but at least he'd _fill _the silence. Seifer didn't have a goddamned clue what to say.

He tucked Quistis' file back into the stack, careful to tap everything back into the same slightly misaligned pile he'd disturbed earlier. "Nothing."

"Sorta' looks like you're snoopin', Almasy."

"Tch." He folded both hands behind his head. "Not much else to do. You know you're a shit conversationalist?"

Irvine's lips twitched in a faint ghost of a smile that made the dry snake-shedding skin around his mouth crack. "Shoulda' invited Dincht to say. He never runs out of stuff to talk about."

"Yeah, that's sort of the problem. And I'm really fucking sick of sitting through his love poems. It's not like he's ever going to actually get up the balls to give them to Ellone, luckily for her." He brought his boots back up to thump soundly echoing across the desk. "Quistis told me she's gonna' be here tomorrow, by the way. Ellone, I mean. To visit you. She's been helping Cid out at the orphanage-visiting Squall's demon spawn or something."

"Ah, that kid ain't so bad. For being Squall's offspring, he's actually pretty friendly. Think he's gonna' be a chatty one when he starts talkin'. Been hanging around Dincht too much."

Seifer snorted and rolled his eyes toward the ceiling. "Fucking wonderful."

There was a long dry reptile slide of charred tongue over even more charred lips, and then that terminal patient rasp again. "You and Quistis doin' ok?"

Seifer frowned, unknotted his fingers, relaced them again. The guy breathed in eerie breath mask hisses of inhalations through implants that pumped oxygen through him because his lungs couldn't do it anymore, and he was concerned about Seifer's relationship. He was pretty sure that if he'd been in a similar situation to Kinneas, everyone else and all their messy tangled fucking love stories could go fuck themselves sideways for all he cared.

He never had understood why fate was such a cruel nasty bitch. Kinneas was better than most of them, and life just kept dick punching the guy when he was down.

It pissed him the hell off.

He unwound one of his hands to grope for the corner of his right eye and the itch there that was really starting to fucking annoy him, and he took a long time answering, trying to figure out what the hell you said to a guy who'd lost the woman he'd loved since he was a kid. Maybe his relationship with Quistis wasn't perfect, maybe he was a jerk sometimes (most of the time,) and maybe she was still occasionally the prudishly stick-fucked Intructor he'd wanted to hate fuck on top of her desk in front of the whole class, but at least they were _alive_, at least they were together and in love and he hadn't lost her on a shit-scented battlefield with his mother standing over him swirled in dawn-smears of pink-tinged blood that made her look like just a mother again and not a monster.

"I'm thinking about asking her to marry me," he blurted out, rubbing one scar-freckled hand over his mouth and glaring up at the ceiling. "I haven't told anyone else yet, so keep your fucking mouth shut."

An arid scrub-brush hiss he thought might be a laugh. "I'm not Dincht. It's not gonna' be all over Garden three minutes from now."

"Not right now. I was thinking in a few months or something. Maybe." If he wasn't busy beating the shit out of Squall for trying to take Quistis away from him.

"You sound real sure of yourself. It's inspiring."

"It's _Quistis_. I don't have a fucking clue what she's going to say. She's never mentioned wanting to or anything, I just…" He frowned again and scratched awkwardly underneath his chin, not looking away from that water-stained ceiling overhead.

"You don't wanna' be without her," Irvine said quietly. "I get it. I was gonna'…I was gonna' start saving up for a ring for Selphie, because I felt the same damn way. So you don't have to explain it to me, man." He struggled up onto one elbow, those breath mask hisses sharpening into jagged wheezes that scared Seifer.

"Hey-take it fucking easy."

"…m all right. You gotta' ring yet?"

"Tch. I went into Balamb a few weeks ago when I was home on leave and stopped by this little shop and the old hag in there kept firing off all these questions at me like it was a fucking interrogation-what size does she need, what kind of carats are you looking at, cut, platinum or gold-I didn't even know what the hell she was talking about. How the hell would I know what size Quistis' finger is, for shit's sake?"

He was positive now that arid scrub-brush hiss was a laugh. "You're supposed to figure all that out before you go shopping so you have an idea of what you're looking for before you even get in the jewelry store."

"Yeah, well, it's not really my line of expertise."

"Tell you what, man-soon as I get outta' here I'll help you out. Get it outta' Quisty if she's a diamonds or a rare gems kinda' girl. I'm a lot more subtle than you anyway. Not that that's hard."

"She thinks diamonds are boring. She mentioned that a long time ago. She said chocolate was a girl's best friend and that she never really understood what the big shit-fit over diamonds was."

"Quisty deserves somethin' more unique, anyway. We'll get you something she can't say no to. Course, if we really wanna' make sure she goes for this, we'll have to get someone who's not you to ask her."

"You're a fucking riot, cowboy," Seifer snapped.

"You might wanna' practice being a little more gracious before you pop the question. I don't think 'will you screw me and only me for the rest of your life' is gonna' cut it. You're gonna' have to figure out this whole being suave thing. I'll give you a few tips, you like."

His friend's lips spasmed in another faint little hint of a smile that made Seifer mirror the expression despite himself. "Fuck you, asshole."

"You gotta' knock off with the sweet talk, Almasy. I've been real lonely lately."

"I don't have time to fend off your advances too. Wuss has been all over me lately; he's starting to get desperate about the whole virgin thing."

Irvine looked away with another smile, fingering the edge of the blanket where it had slid down off his chest and into his lap. "Thanks, Almasy. For stayin' with me."

Seifer's fingers tightened around one another in a series of knuckle pops that sounded like gunfire in the quiet. "Kadowaki wouldn't let me leave until she was sure I didn't have a head injury. It's not like I wouldn't rather be in Quistis' room screwing like rabbits."

Irvine shook his head just slightly, and the smile did not move from his face. "Yeah. Course. Just sayin', is all."

They sat together in silence for a long time, and that ceiling-aimed smile Seifer couldn't seem to let go of gathered into a slow-smoldering warmth in his chest.

**A/N: Bromances are a wonderful thing.**


	5. Interlude Two

**A/N: Totally forgot to post this update this weekend, so now it's getting done on my lunch break. I will post chapter three once chapter five is done (I like to stay ahead of myself,) and as of right now, it's more than halfway complete, so a new chapter should be up before too long. Thanks for reading and, of course, reviews are always appreciated. **

_Dear Selphie,_

_Sometimes I wonder why it is that we do what we do. I used to think it was because most of us just didn't have much of a choice-no family suddenly makes your future real uncertain, and Garden kind of gave us all this sense of purpose. Like we were really doing something with our lives, you know, not just being orphans. _

_But then you know, I thought we had to all have more of a reason than that. You don't just become a soldier because you got nothing better to do, you know? Almasy wants the renown, wants the whole world to bow down and lick his boots and tell him he's better than all of them, Quisty needed a place that was going to accept her after things didn't work out with her foster family, and Squall…you know, I don't know. I'm still tryin to figure that guy out._

_And then you got Zell, and he's just so Hyne-damned _sure _that he's working for the good guys-every order he gets, every person he has to kill-it's all ok because Garden's his home and it wouldn't steer him wrong and we're these Liberi Fatali so the world needs us…but Selph, sometimes I wonder. I don't like questioning what I'm doing, because if I have to question it, it means I might be wrong-it means I mighta just shot someone through the head who didn't need to or wasn't supposed to die, and how am I supposed to live with that? The worst thing that ever happened to me was losing you, and sometimes I can't sleep, thinking about how I've made someone else feel the same damn way. Lots of people, in fact. And you know, that guy staring back at me from the other end of the scope, the one I had to kill before he killed me- he probably thought he was on the right side too._

_Makes you wonder who the good guys really are sometimes. _

_I got a lot of good memories about the orphange and all of you and Cid and Matron, but sometimes I think about how we were all groomed for this-how Cid needed us to kill our mother, his own _wife_ years down the road so he made sure we all found our way into this life, one way or another- and I can't help asking myself how he could do that to us. We were his children, you know? And he sent us off anyway, knowing that the best possible outcome of it all was the death of the woman who used to bake us cookies and play hide and seek with us when we didn't have anyone else, and maybe he found a way to come to terms with it himself somehow- but how did he expect all of us to handle it one day when it all came back to us? Did he even care? _

_I don't like these kinds of questions, Selph honey. But I've been asking myself them more and more lately, and you know, I look at Seifer and Quisty, and I wonder if she dies fighting this war maybe none of us should have had to fight, is he gonna' think it was all worth it in the end, because it was for the greater good? Is she, if something happens to him? _

_If I could go back and never join G. Garden, if you and I coulda gotten married and had a couple of kids and I never had to learn that it's not as hard as you might think to kill a man with your bare hands, if I never picked up a gun and I had a nine to five I went off to every day and your face to come home to-_

_I'd do it. I'd do it in a heartbeat, Selphie. And maybe that's selfish of me, and maybe I shouldn't talk like that because what would have happened if we hadn't been there years ago, what would have happened if Ultimecia had gotten her way and we were all her little slaves…but then I think how much better is it now, with all of us killing each other and probably half of us not even sure why? Trabia and Galbadia hate us because they think we were trying to usher in a new era of sorceresses when really all we ever wanted was to protect a friend who we thought would never hurt a thing._

_And then she did, and now I have to wonder if we weren't wrong all along and if they were right, and if these people I'm killing have a good reason to hate me and just as much right to live as I do. _

_I know you never liked to talk about this stuff because you always wanted to look at the bright side of things, and it wasn't like we had a whole lot of a choice anyway, was it, Selph? You're brought up believing something your whole life, it's hard to turn your back on that and try and take the other side into consideration. But I'm _killin _people. And I can't just do that and not bat an eye. I'm getting more and more sick of it the more I do it, but how am I supposed to tell anyone this? Garden points and I go. That's a soldier's job and that's what I am and that's what I've always been, and that's probably what I'll die being. _

_But I want you to be proud of me Selph honey, wherever you are, and sometimes I can't be proud of myself and I can't imagine you being proud of me either. Yesterday I…yesterday I shot this soldier on the field and then I got up closer and I realized it was just a kid- looked like he was probably fifteen maybe, not even graduated from T. Garden or G. Garden or the Galbadian army or wherever he was from, and I just blew away his life before it even started. I don't know what kind of person does that. And I know it was him or me, but a kid needs a childhood you know, and he never should have been out there in the first place. And ours were cut short the same way, and Cid and Matron, maybe they really did love us…but they still did that to us. They still made us all into what we are today, and they did it knowing that one day we'd kill our mother, knowing that one day maybe we'd all die ourselves, or have to watch each other die…and how could you do that to someone you love? I don't understand._

_Cid's back to running the orphanage. He's got about half a dozen kids there right now, all about the same age we were, and he says this time it's going to be different, this time they're all going to get to be kids and live normal lives and grow up to be lawyers and doctors and teachers…but I can't help worrying. What if there's some kind of need for them the way there was for us? What if the means justifies the end for Cid again and Garden gets a whole new group of bright-eyed little things who don't have a Hyne-friggin clue that playin around in sparring class is just the beginning, that it's all fun and games until you watch a training partner get killed or you make it all the way to your first SeeD exam without ever seeing someone die and then all of a sudden you're kneelin in a man's guts puking your heart out wondering where the hell all of this came from? _

_I don't know anymore, Selph. I don't know what I'm doin or why I'm doin it or who I am or what I might become and it scares me. Seems like I'm afraid all the time- for me waking up each day without you, for all our friends out there doing the same thing I'm doing, maybe getting killed doing it…I can't lose anyone else. That's really my biggest fear when you get right to it: that I'm going to lose everyone and be all alone, that the next bullet or bomb is never going to take me because the whole Hyne-damned world's just going to chew me up and spit me out and leave me to sort it all out on my own. _

_Funny how different the real world is from the books Matron used to read us. I guess it took me too long to understand that. _

_I miss you Selph honey. So much._

_Love, Irvine_


	6. Chapter Three

**A/N: Hope you guys enjoy this update. Just a quick note to let you know that you can now also find me under the account name of CBK1000; I don't have much posted under that name, but there is a Seifer standalone that may become a full-fledged novel one day but for now is just a one-shot, as I learned my lesson a long time ago in trying to write more than one multi-chapter at a time. If you like FF VII, and Reno in particular, I have two one-shots up in the FF VII section, which is an entirely new genre for me but has been helpful in forcing me to step out of my comfort zone and stretch my writing muscles a little. I haven't completely decided yet, but after finishing this fic up, I may be switching over to writing under that penname, which is why I'm letting you guys know about it.**

**Also, if I remember correctly, G. Garden doesn't actually train SeeDs, but for the sake of this story we're going to pretend they ran their cadets through SeeD exams just like Balamb.**

**Chapter Three**

Dingo Desert

Galbadia

4 Years Ago

Winch the finger down in gradual slow-creeping increments in time to the flick flick flick of your adrenaline-lit heartbeat, winding down into calm breath-hushed thumps against your chest.

Least, that's what the manual says.

Paraphrased, of course.

Section 139b of G. Garden's SeeD manual is a clinically dry jumble of wind speed calculation and breath control and pulse point deceleration that doesn't give you a Hyne-damned hint what it's all really about.

It's watching the cadets beside you and the ones in front of you, men you have gambled with and women you have slept with, boys you have back-clapped and girls you have shared smiles and beds and secret cautious pieces of yourself with become fish-flops of red-stained rag doll that happen all around you.

It's watching gunfire chew a man's throat into a ragged lipsticked smile of a wound, aimed at you.

SeeD manual page 318 section 1c: carry out all mission parameters no matter what.

Just because men and women are bleeding and dying and screaming all around you is no exucse to quit, to become a moaning blood-stained coil on the ground with both hands over your ears-

It's the only thing you want to do, the only thing you can _imagine _doing, but there is a full-throated roar in your ears that brings you shaking back to reality and there is _no excuse Kinneas_-

This is your SeeD test.

This is your life, will always _be _your life, until you die.

Political activists are mounting an assault on D-District to free a prisoner and maybe there are friends and lovers and instructors who taught you everything you know about pulling a trigger going down all around you, maybe you are scared and tired and you just want to go _home_, not to Garden's echoing student-choked hallways but to a seaside cottage and a tiny green-eyed brunette whose smile is the most beautiful thing you have ever seen-

But this is your mission.

Carry out all mission parameters no matter what.

_Take a breath Kinneas-_

_Skirmish lines, cadets do not retreat hold the fucking _line_-_

Your rifle slides around in your sweat-smeared palm and you cannot feel your legs you cannot feel _anything _that is not the echoing blood-tinged thunder of your heartbeat in your throat and underneath your knees are death-scented grains of shit-stained sand that remind you of home-

And there is a different thunder coming from your shoulder now, an eternal rumbling bellow that no full-throated instructor holler can hold a candle to and ahead of you is another fish-flop of red-stained rag doll except this is by _your hand _and inside your mouth your tongue goes desert wasteland parched-

Did you kill him? _Did you kill him?_!

There is nothing about this the range prepared you for. Targets do not sound melon _thocks _of hollow point-ruined skull rebounding off sand-scoured boulders that hold smears of red-smudged brain-

_Breathe Kinneas-_

Your boots chew lines of fire across your heels and over your toes as you run and along your side your rifle swings a long smooth arc of sprinter's pump-

And there are _intestines _in the sand underneath your feet, there are headless folds of bodies that used to be people you knew and you are holding onto a little girl's smile with everything you've got, with everything you _are _because it is the only way you are going to survive this, it is the only way you are going to _live _with yourself-

You are not breathing-_you are not breathing take a deep breath Kinneas-_

The thunder at your shoulder is back and to the right spiral glints of gold-polished casings that burn your skin where they glance scorching off it-

_-irvy quisty says you can have tea with us because you're nicer than the other boys you have to sit like this see-_

You watch splatters of blade-opened heads and severed blood-spraying legs and you lean over to throw up, you heave vitriolic splashes of breakfast and then you wipe your mouth and _you keep going _because somewhere those eyes and that smile are waiting for you and one day when you are a man and not a shivering frightened boy who doesn't want to hurt anyone you are going to scour the world looking for them-

Carry out all mission parameters no matter what.

SeeD manual page 325 section 5a: you are there to get the job done when no one else can; allow no distractions to interfere with your mission.

Breathe-

_Deep breaths, Kinneas; hold your position-_

Sunset is a fireworks smear over your head and you hold onto that smile like a mantra and hours later when it is all over, when you are collecting congratulatory back claps of proudly smiling instructors across shoulders that flinch and twitch away-

You can only wonder what that smiling green-eyed girl would think of you now.

* * *

><p>Balamb Garden<p>

Balamb

Present Day

The first time he saw a mirror, he cried.

Kadowaki made carefully sure all reflective surfaces were covered up in his presence after that. Couldn't let former ladies man Irvine Kinneas see just how far he had fallen into utter homeliness, after all. And Hyne- homeliness nothing; there had been a black-flaking monstrosity staring back at him from that innocuous wood-framed glass where his face used to be.

The looks on his friends' faces had been harder to take; instinctively flinching horror cross-wiping to bright counterfeit smiles that did not fool him for a damn second, that made him want to die here in this bleach-scrubbed sanctuary with machines breathing for him and Selphie waiting for him and fricking Zell damn Dincht yammering on in his ear-

He still felt like that sometimes. And then he took a look around, he brought his eyes glancing up off Seifer on his right frowning down at the cards fanned out between his fingers and Quistis on his left, using his blanket-layered legs as an impromptu Triple Triad board, Zell at his feet rubbing his chin-

And suddenly nothing looked quite so ugly anymore. Men were still dying out there in the field and Selphie was gone and his Hyne-damned legs folded into useless slumps of scar-scabbed meat every time he disobeyed Dr. Kadowaki's orders to drag himself stumbling from his bed- but there were people who gave a shit if he stopped trying, there were friends waiting for him to come back to them, that would nurse sucking black holes of wounds if Irvine Kinneas gave up on himself-

And he could never quite bring himself to do that to them. He knew what it felt like, after all, to be the one standing over the bed and not in it, listening to heart monitor blips of failing vitals and halting machine-pumped wheezes of faltering blood-gurgling inhalations. It felt like everything unraveling, the whole damned world coming apart underneath you, like professionally-placed blows to the gut and chest and throat, and sometimes he still did not know how he had survived it.

He didn't want them to have to figure it out.

Seifer slapped a card down across Irvine's thigh; he twitched underneath the blankets with a yelp that brought Zell's head stiffly up from its chin-cupped slant, one hand swinging around to rub his neck. "Ouch, man! Watch what you're doing."

"Seifer." Quistis frowned. "You knocked my card off the board."

"It's not a board it's my damn leg-appreciate it if you'd all keep that in mind."

"You lose."

"How do I _lose_-I don't even have a card down now thanks to you."

"The rules say that you can't attempt to change cards after your opponent's revealed theirs. You automatically forfeit if you take your card off the board. It's called cheating, Instructor."

"The rules do _not _say that, and even if they did, I don't think forcing another player's card off the board counts as a forfeit on their part."

Zell leaned over the bed railing, stretching out a hand for the card Seifer had just set down. "Whoa! Bahamut! Gimme!"

"Get your fucking Wuss hands off; you have to earn it."

"Man, come on; you've got like eight of them."

"I do fucking not. Instructor, get your hands off the board and just admit defeat; you're making everyone uncomfortable with all this sneaky underhanded shit." Seifer smirked at her, reaching for the card she was trying to retrieve from the folds of blanket it had slipped between. He snatched it before she could fish it free and held it above her head with another shit-eating smile on his face, and Irvine folded both hands carefully in his lap; he'd seen Quistis favor groin shots in battle before and didn't want his boys ending up as collateral damage.

"Hey, so, I'm gonna' ask Ellone out," Zell announced, making another grab for the Bahamut card when Seifer wasn't paying attention.

"Get the fuck _off _that, Wuss; you're such a shitty card player it's not going to help you anyway."

"Did you hear what I said?"

"I heard some chicken sqwaking about his testicles finally descending, so yeah, I assume that was you."

Zell punched him in the side of the head.

Quistis hastily grabbed for Seifer's arm as he blurted an expletive and made an echoic clang of a lunge over the railing, rattling the entire bed frame; her fingertips just glanced off his elbow and came up with a triumphant fistful of his shirt collar, and she reeled him back over the side of the bed like a fisherman hauling in his catch, keeping one hand balled warningly up against his throat. "Stop acting like children."

"He fucking hit me!"

"You were being a jerk," she pointed out calmly, extracting herself from his shirt.

"So I make an _insinuation _that he's a puberty-challenged fuckwit and he gets to punch me in the fucking head?" Seifer snapped. "What happens if I accidentally step on his foot- he ass rapes me?"

"I'd put it in that gloryhole in the back room of Mallon's before I stuck you, Almasy- you know the one with all the-"

Quistis' eyes narrowed. "What were you doing at Mallon's?"

"Wuss thought watching a bunch of naked ladies grind around on some poles would help him finally keep it up long enough to rub one off, but it didn't work. Well, not until this one came out with an adam's apple the size of my head, anyway."

Quistis rolled her eyes. "I'm going to pretend that you were there out of the goodness of your heart to save misguided young women from the lives of debauchery they were choosing to pursue."

"I got dragged there. That place is fucking nasty."

Zell leaned back in his chair and put his feet up on the bed railing. "Yeah…uh, we were actually there getting Squall another hooker. Remember that stripper we hired that wasn't actually a stripper? We thought it'd be funny to kinda' do a follow-up prank."

"I remember," Quistis said frostily. "I burned a hundred gil worth of sheets after finding her in my bed. I think you should all re-appraise your sense of humor."

"Well, we didn't end up getting one. See, Almasy started a fight with the bouncer because he overheard the guy saying that he'd help B. Garden do whatever the fuck it wanted if Squall would let him do ya' in the ass, and I stepped in to help because Almasy was getting whaled on-"

"There were fucking _three _of them, and they were all the size of goddamned tanks-"

"-and I'm loyal like that, so it turned into this big brawl and that stripper with the adam's apple, _who I wasn't checking out _jumped in, and he/she was _strong_, man, but we were holding our own pretty well, then stupid Kinneas, who was in the back, comes running up yelling about how we gotta' get our asses out of there because the manager's threatening to kill him 'cause it turns out the chick he was trying to hire to screw with Squall was the guy's daughter and not a hooker and he was really pissed, so now Almasy and I are taking on like three guys apiece, and it's getting pretty nasty- like, I was starting to get worried maybe the bouncers and the he/she were going to gang rape us for messing them up or something, and then the manager comes hauling ass up to us-"

"Does this story have an end?" Quistis rubbed her forehead.

"Sure; three hours later, going by Wuss' storytelling standards. Let me sum it up for you, Instructor: your boyfriend is so exceptionally amazing he dropped his guys and Wuss' too, because the little guy was starting to struggle-"

"Dude, I was _not_-"

"-and got everyone out of there before they could dress Kinneas in a thong and put him on pole duty. That was the night I didn't even bother taking you to the bedroom when you came over to my place, and we just fucked on the kitchen floor, remember? I had images I needed to purge from my head."

Quistis buried her face in her hands.

"I didn't really need to hear that, Almasy," Irvine pointed out.

"Yeah, man, I'm tryin' to eat here."

"You're not eating anything, dumbfuck."

"Well, I'm gonna' be eating _later_, and I don't wanna be thinking about your penis or something while I'm trying to enjoy my hot dog. And I _eat _off your kitchen floor, you know! So does my dog."

"I'm not going to let the fact that you're a heinous fucking pig put a cramp in my sex life."

"All right, speakin' of cramps- kitchen floor's gotta' bring on a lotta' those, right? I mean, Selphie and I snuck into Squall's office one time and-"

"Please." Quistis held up a hand, the other still tightly heel-pressed into the bridge of her nose. "Let's not discuss sex lives. Zell, you were saying you're going to ask Ellone out?"

"Tch," Seifer scoffed. "He's been saying that for like a year now."

"It hasn't been a year. And ok, Quisty, I'm just gonna' ask one thing, ok, and then I'll drop it, promise, ok? But, I mean…do women…uh, you know, want the guy to ask them first before they put the moves on them? Like with sex and stuff?"

"Well, it's generally advisable to get permission from a woman before sleeping with her."

"Yeah, not getting a woman to agree to have sex with you is kind of called rape. Which you know, for you would be every woman, so maybe it's worth the risk of going to prison, because let's face it, Wuss: you couldn't even pay someone."

"I didn't mean like that!" Zell snapped. "I just mean like if it's clear she wants it, and you're both in the moment and stuff, do you just go for it, or does the woman want the gentlemanly approach? Like asking if he can kiss her and stuff?"

"Why the fuck do you need to know any of this? You can't even work up the balls to ask Ellone on a date but you think you're gonna' be Mr. L.J. Cool Suave trying to persuade her to bone you?"

"Seifer, leave him alone."

"I can't just drop it when he's acting legally retarded, Instructor."

"Dincht, taken it from a man who's known a lot of ladies-"

"Come the fuck on; I bet you've slept with three chicks tops. Lot more guys than that, though, probably."

"Shut up, Almasy. Just 'cause you're picturing my face while you and Quisty are havin' relations is no reason for you to go around making insinuations about a man's sexuality-"

"_Please_. Ellone?"

"Yeah, so, I'm gonna' ask her out. Next time I see her."

"I thought she was supposed to be here, actually," Irvine said, scratching the IV line in his right hand. Damn thing itched constantly.

"She was. Trains got commandeered again." Zell looked down at his feet with a frown. "I hope she's careful. It's not just Estharan soldiers using those things."

"She will be. I mean, she's got you to come home to, right Wuss?"

"Yeah, that's true."

"I was being sarcastic. If I was her I'd never even get on the train. If I had your face to look forward to, I'd just lay on the tracks."

Quistis sighed and began to massage her temples. "Seifer. Please. For just one minute-"

"Don't be a dick," Zell finished for her. "_Anyway_, I'm gonna' do it this time. Swear. I know I've said that before, but it just didn't feel _right_, you know?"

Seifer snorted. "For an entire fucking year?"

"Shut up! It wasn't a year."

"Whatever. I'll believe you grew a set when I see you and Ellone sucking face instead of just making fucking googly eyes at each other all the time. It's annoying as hell." He flicked the Bahamut card up against his knuckles. "Hey, Dincht- you used to crap yourself as a kid, didn't you? At the orphanage?"

"_No_! The hell does that have to do with anything, anyway?"

"Oh, nothing," Seifer replied nonchalantly. "I was just wondering if 'Sis' remembered that. She never junctioned any GFs, you know. So that time I pantsed you out in the water and you stood there for like two hours crying and screaming at me to give you your pants back and you finally just had to come in because the tide was going out anyway, and when you got to shore your dick was all shriveled up like a prune- bet you she remembers that."

Irvine folded his hand into a fist he brought shaking up to his mouth, and Dincht zeroed in on him with his best ball-shriveling glare, his palms becoming crescent moon-dented fists on his thighs. "What are _you _laughing at?"

"Zell," Quistis interjected, sweeping her cards into a neat pile she began to meticulously sort underneath Seifer's amused stare. "Squall's going to Cid's tomorrow to visit Adan- maybe you could tag along to see Ellone. We can bring her back to Garden to see Irvine."

Seifer's spine pulled into a long slow alignment that snapped him rigidly upright, and Irvine watched his hand come into a white-knuckled clench around the card he was holding. He smiled tightly. "I'll be going too. We'll all be one big cozy fucking family."

Irvine buried a smile behind his hand; Quistis looked distinctly unenthusiastic.

"Yeah! Sounds good, Quisty; thanks. How do you guys think I should play it, you know? Like, should I be all aloof- girls like the whole hard-to-get thing, right? Or should I just go for it right off the bat- like run up and kiss her in front of everyone?"

"I know exactly what you should do." Seifer smirked across the bed at Quistis, who was subtly shaking her head in response to whatever he was about to say.

"What?"

"Not be Chicken Wuss. Because let's be honest, Dincht- that's the only way you're ever going to get a woman."

"Hey, shut the hell up! Quisty, tell your asshole boyfriend to back off. Tighten the leash or something, huh?"

"Piss off, Wuss. You're just jealous because Ellone's got a noose around your balls but isn't doing anything with it. Or, you know, them."

The door slid open with a soft gear-oiled whoosh, and Dr. Kadowaki slipped inside with a clipboard in one hand, unkempt flyaways of gray-salted updo hanging loosely down around her ears. She offered a smile that crinkled both eyes into age-webbed slits that spread tiny fingers of wrinkles all the way to her temples, reminding Irvine just how old she really was. Of course, working at a place like Garden probably wasn't horribly conducive to graceful aging, considering the kind of shit you saw everyday. And this woman saw her share of ugliness for Hyne-damned sure, his face being the latest example.

"You doing all right?" she asked Irvine, checking the drip in his arm and taking down a few notes on her clipboard as she squinted at the machines fanned in a blinking semi-circle around his bed. "You bothering my patient?" She poked Seifer in the arm with her pen.

"Of course not. I'm the buffer between him and Dincht, you know, the one keeping him sane between all the hot dog conspiracies and fucking love poetry."

She poked him again, scowling. "What did I tell you about your language? How's your head?"

He smiled beatifically up at her. "Feels fucking great, Dr."

Quistis shook her head again, but Irvine saw a little flicker of a smile cross her lips, and he looked away with his own smile that he suddenly noticed did not hurt him anymore. Maybe it was Seifer Almasy faking a head wound to keep him company in a shadow-etched hell that reminded him of Selphie dying in his arms- maybe it was his friends all around him, Zell punching Seifer in the shoulder and Quistis scolding them both, but you know…day by slow-creeping day, that little girl's smile on a beach where none of them were soldiers, where none of them had to die or lose each other or do anything but splash screaming through the waves, clutching stick sword-hacked limbs of gut-leaking dolls-

It was starting to become this warm little ball in his chest that did not hurt or bleed or suppurate when he touched it. It was starting to become something that he could live with, that he looked forward to each day upon rising, and he knew it was exactly what she would have wanted for him.

He held onto his smile as he closed his eyes and leaned his head back against the bed. _Dear Selphie…I miss the hell out of you, but I've still got our jackass friends here for me so I think…I think one day I'm gonna' be ok._

* * *

><p>He stood with his toes in the surf and both hands in his pockets, staring out over that flat mirror-calm surface just beginning to feather into folds of breeze-ruffled waves where the sea met sun-baked sand.<p>

He had taken his boots off, because it was what his mother always used to urge him to do.

_-seifer come on follow me it's hot today the water feels good on your feet doesn't it-_

Call him a fucking sap, but digging his toes into this viscous fish-reeking shit under his feet brought those lavender-scented mother's hands back to him like she was right fucking next to him, like he was boy Seifer again with his fingers in hers and a smile on his face that didn't hurt his goddamned chest. He used to smile a lot, you know? Maybe because he was stupid and naive and he hadn't had a goddamned clue what was waiting for him out beyond that thick forest-tangle of backyard they'd all played in as kids-

But once upon a time, Seifer Almasy was a boy with a mother who loved him and a conscience that didn't yank him gasping from his bed every night, and if burying his toes under piles of seaweed-smeared driftwood helped him remember that just a little, then he was going to stand here until the fucking world ended.

He could hear children shrieking and laughing and sprinting across frail bone-creaking porch steps behind him, and he shut his eyes.

_-on three seifer remember don't jump until I say so or the wave's going to get you hold tight onto my hand ok I've got you-_

"Nice day, hmm?"

A little of boy Seifer's smile creased his face as Quistis stepped quietly up beside him, one arm grazing a line of warmth down his. He pulled his right hand from his pocket and reached down for hers, wrapping those scar-knobbed fingers up in his with a squeeze that made her tilt that smiling face up around toward his, and there was his goddamned heart again, pounding out a kettledrum rhythm in his chest and what a _fucking _whipped little pussy he was-

Quistis leaned her head up against his shoulder, and he decided he didn't care.

"Adan's doing well."

Seifer pressed his sneer into her hair. "Yeah, I give a fuck about Leonhart's demon offspring. That kid's fucking creepy."

"He's a nice boy. And you didn't seem to terribly mind picking him up when Squall went inside to talk to Cid and he came over to you." He could feel her smile against his shoulder.

"Tch. Just because I knew it would piss Pubes off."

"Mm. I'm sure. The other kids are making 'Uncle Zell' be their pony right now. I thought you might want to see that."

"What, his grand plan to sweep Ellone off her feet didn't work out?"

Quistis pulled her face back from his shoulder, frowning. "She's not here, actually. Apparently she went to the train station this morning to see if they were back on schedule yet, and Cid hasn't heard from her since then. Which means she probably made it onto a train and is on her way to Garden right now; the tunnels have horrible reception. But not being able to get through to her is worrying Zell of course, so I don't think we're going to stay long. Or at least, Zell isn't. Squall will probably stay a couple of nights; Xu and Nida are handling things while he's gone anyway, and he arranged for them to take over for a few days. I thought in an hour or two if we still can't get through to her I'd drive the rest of us back and stop at the station along the way. We can ask around and see if anyone remembers her and whether or not she was able to board a train, and then we'll meet her at Garden, which is probably where she's heading right now." She frowned again. "I hope."

"She's fine." Seifer flipped his hand dismissively in the air. "Might be stranded somewhere, though. When the armies commandeer the trains they pretty much just kick everyone off- they don't fuck with civilians for the most part except for that whole 'collateral damage' thing. Shit would hit the fan if they hijacked a train full of innocents."

"Yes, but someone from Galbadia may have spotted her and recognized her as the niece of the president of Esthar. Just because they withdrew from the city doesn't mean they're giving up on occupying Esthar."

"You worry too fucking much, Instructor. You're going to have wrinkles by twenty five, and then I'm going to have to replace you with an eighteen-year-old."

Quistis smiled wanly. "As much as I hate to admit it, I'm sure you're right."

"See? Everything would be a lot better if you'd just admit that more often."

"I don't like lying."

He gave her a little nudge with his elbow that sent her stumbling forward into waves that dragged tongue-strokes of whitecap over the tips of those hand-polished boots, and she shot him her best detention _now _look over one shoulder. "Seifer, do you realize how difficult it is to get the smell of fish out of leather?"

He let his lips spread wide around a smile that deepened her frown, and slipped both hands back into his pockets. "Got you to stop bitching about Ellone, didn't I?"

She pulled her feet free with suction cup squelches that reminded him of being up to the fucking elbow in a soldier's leg, pinching his femoral artery shut as the kid bawled and screamed for mommy and shit himself on a battlefield that kept going on around him like it didn't give two insignificant fucks. Showed you just how much of a damn war gave about glorious final stands and heroic posturing- the kid had taken that hit trying to stop an X-ATM by himself after it had made fucking hamburger of his friend.

Another sixteen-year-old dying in his arms, coughing up red-spraying clots that stained his coat- you'd think he'd have been used to it by that point. You'd think Seifer fucking Almasy would have something better to do than watch after cadets that shouldn't have been on the field in the first place-and you'd sure as fuck think he wouldn't lay blinking up at his tent ceiling at night because some dipshit kid with more enthusiasm than fucking brains had engaged a Galbadian soldier he hadn't noticed sneaking up behind him and taken a bullet through the goddamned teeth for his trouble.

He was shit sick of killing people. Never thought he'd feel that way before- it was what knights did, after all. Princesses to rescue and all that shit, you know- you didn't get to ride off into the sunset without slaying a dragon here or murdering an evil witch there.

His mother had never told him that sometimes knights lost people they loved; his fucking mother had never _told _him that what fighting was really all about was going hungry and cold and spending your nights wishing you were wrapped up in a soft warm pair of arms instead of your dirty death-reeking coat-

In the stories, the knight always got there in time. Kill the monster, save the damsel- be a fucking hero. Simpler than shit. The heroes of stories did not have nightmares or panic attacks or mothers that came for them in the dark-

The heroes of stories were a bunch of lying fucking excrement, but somehow he'd never quite learned to accept that. Even these days, waist-deep in Galbadians with Dincht beside him and the cowboy on the other side, there was a little left-over piece of boy Seifer that kept believing, that was so fucking _sure _they were all safe, that Quistis back at Garden would always be there waiting for him, that his mother's death, Messenger Girl's, Raijin and Fujin's- they'd all been horrible flukes. He was Seifer _fucking _Almasy, you know? And he was always going to win.

Except when he didn't. Except when Irvine got himself blown all to shit and his Posse was now just a couple of flower-sprinkled mounds in the fucking dirt, and every day he spent with Quistis might be their last because one day he might take a blade through the intestines or she might slump over coughing larynx like shrapnel before he could do a goddamned thing about it-

He watched her back scowling from the waves, and brought one hand up through a loop that brought it shaking to his forehead scar. "Hey."

She raised an eyebrow in his direction. "Yes?"

Seifer shook his head. "Never mind."

A little crease of a frown line dug a furrow through her brow. "All right. Did you want to go back up to the house?"

What he had wanted to do was tell her he loved her, but she hadn't said it to him since that night he'd lain in her arms talking about Matron's garden and all the people he had lost without saying good-bye. What he had wanted to do was pull her up against his chest and ask her to just fucking run away with him or something- leave Garden, leave spine-shattered kids and shit-smudges of red-streaked humps under his boots that used to be people; he'd get them a house by the sea or some shit like that, one where his mother's ghost didn't play in the waves and he wouldn't have to see her white-marble headstone beside Messenger Girl's throwing sun-scatters across a beach where boy Seifer used to be happy.

He'd build her a porch swing, get her a dog and a fucking desk- whatever the hell she wanted.

He just wanted them both out of this shitty fucking life before it was too late. He just wanted the goddamned ending he'd always thought he was going to get- was that so fucking horrible? Was that too much to ask?

Seifer swallowed and looked away from her. "Yeah. Sure."

Three of the kids had Wuss down on his hands and knees, two astride his back and the third holding a braided length of weed she had looped around Zell's neck and was using to lead him forward at a stumbling 'trot' that made both children on his back giggle and eagerly hammer their swinging heels into his sides. Seifer threw back his head and laughed, and out of the corner of his eye he saw Quistis raise one hand to her lips, shoulders trembling.

"Hey!" Zell called out loudly, panting. "Uncle Seifer wants to take over as the pony."

The children cheered, and he could see Quistis' shoulders begin to jerk even harder.

He crossed his arms and scowled. "'Uncle Seifer' said no such goddamned thing-"

Fuck- too late. The vultures had already abandoned Zell in a ragged sweat-smeared heap beside the square of drooping weed-choked flowers that was all that was left of Matron's garden and were galloping at full speed toward their new toy. The first he caught under the arms and swung neatly up under one arm like the kid was a football- he hardly weighed more than that anyway- but the little girl crashed into his knees hard enough to reel him staggering backward, and suddenly he was flat on his back under a whole goddamned heap of them.

"I'm gonna' braid Uncle Seifer's hair!" the little girl shrieked, bouncing on the tips of her toes as she reached for his head. One of the boys plopped himself down on Seifer's chest and used the collar of his formerly clean shirt to wipe his nose. "Can I see your sword, Uncle Seify?"

He rolled a frantic white-rimmed look back at Quistis as the third boy began to untie his boots and the mouthy little girl started to tug painfully at his hair, and she was fucking _leaving _him, walking away bent over at the waist laughing so hard she almost tripped over Zell as he began to slowly scrape himself up off the sand-

"Hey!" he snapped. "You _mind_, Trepe?"

"Sword!" the boy screamed, smiling a toothless gum-gape of a grin at him. "Puh_leeease_- Maise got to see it last time."

"Cuz I'm better. And special," the girl standing at his head explained imperiously.

Seifer slid his hands underneath the arms of the boy sitting on him and brought himself groaning upright, letting the kid dangle from his fingers. "Kier- get the hell off my boots. Maise, let go of my fucking hair. It's not long enough to braid. _You_," He jerked his chin at the kid swinging still smiling from his hands, and narrowed both eyes warningly, "can see my sword after you pants Uncle Zell. Go." He set the kid down as Maise reluctantly let go of his hair and got one hand underneath him, using it to lever himself up off the sand.

Kier had managed to wrestle one of his boots free while Seifer was dealing with the other two and was now in the process of happily filling it with sand. Seifer snatched it back from him and the boy let out a foghorn of a scream that made him wince- please fucking Hyne tell him he and the rest of the orphanage gang hadn't been like this as children. No wonder Cid had groomed them all for a profession that would probably kill them horribly.

"_Shit_!" Zell yelped, making a frantic grab for the puddle of fabric around his ankles. "Knock it off, Darrick!"

"Language," Quistis reminded them both, frowning.

"It's ok, Aunty Quisty!" Maise yelled, getting a death grip around one of Seifer's legs with both of her arms. "We always learn lots of new words from Uncle Seifer!"

Seifer picked her up by the collar of her shirt and swung her up onto his hip; she transferred her arms from his leg to his neck, and Quistis smiled at both of them. "Darrick pulled my hair again today, Uncle Seifer. Can you beat him up for me?"

"Why don't you beat him up yourself?"

"Can't. He's bigger then me."

"Than," Quistis corrected automatically, and Seifer rolled his eyes.

"It doesn't matter how big he is. Soon as he's not looking, hit him between the legs as hard as you can."

"Seifer," Quistis warned him again.

"I'm teaching her how to defend herself, Instructor. Shouldn't you approve?" He tightened the arm around Maise's waist and bounced her slightly on his hip. "I beat up guys bigger _then _me all the time." The smirk he aimed at Quistis prompted an eye roll that made him smile, and he stepped easily around Zell, still struggling to get his pants buckled as children jumped and shrieked all around him.

"Really?"

"Yeah. It's all about placement. Like if I kick Uncle Chicken Wuss in the back of the knee right now, he'll lose his grip on his pants and they'll fall off again," he explained, demonstrating.

"HEY!" Zell screamed.

Maise giggled. Quistis helped fend off the horde of children that immediately began fighting over the pants, handing them quickly off to Zell who made a run for the bushes lining the front porch.

"Darrick's pulling your hair because he likes you." Seifer set her down on the top step of the front porch and brushed sand from his pants.

"Nuh uh- he called me ugly."

"That means he likes you too."

"It means he likes me if he calls me ugly?" Maise demanded incredulously.

"Yeah. I used to do it to your Aunt Quistis all the time."

"Ewwww!" she screamed, making a noisy beeline for the door. It slammed thundering shut behind her, and Seifer took a seat two steps down, stretching his long legs out in front of him.

"You're surprisingly good with children," Quistis said, settling herself on the step below him. "I never would have pictured you doing anything more than ignoring them."

"Tch. Hard to ignore these brats. 'Sides, Instructor, it's easy to be good with kids in comparison to you."

"I'm not _that _bad with children, Seifer."

"Dear child, thank you for your interest in Instructor Quistis Trepe, SeeD I.D. Number 67510334. In response to your question, 'why is the sky blue,' there is a molecular scatter in the air that reflects blue light blah blah blah some kind of scientist horseshit."

"I do _not _sound like that." She glared at him; he opened his lips around a shit-eating grin. "And how did you know my SeeD I.D. number?"

"Fuck- that was really it? I just pulled something out of my ass. No, I used to break into Cid's office and sneak shit into your file, actually. It was fun. Probably read like a soap opera. 'Instructor number fourteen was caught smoking naked in the teacher's lounge. Instructor number fourteen seen leaving cadet Seifer Almasy's room, looking extremely pleased. Later overheard bragging about the size of his 'gun blade'. Instructor number fourteen is on leave to give birth to a Chocobo conceived out of wedlock.'"

"That was _you_?"

"I woulda' thought the whole bragging about the gunblade thing would have given it away, Instructor."

"That one I didn't see."

Zell slid to a panting sand-smudged halt in front of them, leaning both hands down against his knees to support his waist-bent hunch, coughing. "You stupid…asshole!"

"_Language_, Chicken Wuss!" Seifer scolded his friend.

"Gonna' kill you…stupid…bastard!" He wiped sweat from his eyes. "You heard anything from Ellone yet?" He directed this question toward Quistis, wrinkling up his forehead; his face fell completely when she shook her head, and Seifer glanced uncomfortably away.

He knew that look; it was the kind he used to wear a lot, like the whole fucking world had just been pulled out from underneath him, the kind he still donned sometimes when he sprang gasping from nightmares that showed him a blank black-gaping hole in his life where Quistis used to be.

"Man, I can't just wait around here, Quisty. Can we just leave, please? Squall can stay with Adan like he planned to, and you can drive me back to the station- or I'll walk. I just…I can't keep waiting around here, you know?" His feet began to trace nervous shadowbox patterns in the sand, and Seifer ducked scowling away from a backfist that whistled perilously close to his nose. "What if something happened? Maybe the train she was on crashed or she got kidnapped or something-"

"Zell," Quistis interrupted gently. "You're letting your imagination run away with you. The tunnels between here and Balamb have lousy reception- you know that. Her phone probably doesn't have any signal right now." She pushed herself back up onto both feet using Seifer's thigh as a fulcrum, and dusted both hands down the sides of her Garden-issue slacks. They did nice things for her ass- he'd been noticing that all day.

Zell blew out a noisy breath that brought both fists sagging downward in a shoulder-hunched slump he followed all the way down to the base of the front porch, settling onto his heels and draping both arms around his legs with a frown. "But what if something _did _happen?"

"It didn't," she said firmly. "She'll probably already be at Garden by the time we get home today."

Seifer pushed himself to both feet, and those frail bone-creaking steps underneath him gave a rot-splintered groan that snapped Zell's head frowning upward. "One of the kids is going to fall through those things one day."

Seifer grabbed him roughly by the collar of his shirt. "Get up, Wuss. You have a pair of balls to grow today. I'll take you to the damn train station if Quistis wants to stay a little longer."

She pressed her lips together and shook her head. "No, I'll come. Just let me let Cid and Squall know where we're going really quickly."

Zell's hanging head made him feel like shit, which pissed him off; who the hell would have thought he'd ever see the day when he gave a shit about Zell Dincht's feelings? Seifer let go of his collar as Quistis vanished through the front door and jammed both hands into his pockets. "Quit bein' such a damn wuss. She's fine."

Zell scowled and landed a light punch on his shoulder. "How the hell do _you _know, Almasy?"

"Tch; she's been around that freak dad of Pubes long enough; that fumbling moron could probably babble his way out of any situation. Anybody who took him hostage would just give him right the fuck back to Esthar. Sides, this one time when we were kids, she spanked me- it was the only time she ever hit me; I must have done something really bad, although I don't remember what now- and she hit my ass so hard I couldn't sit down for a week. Think about that all over some Galbadian soldier's dick. She'll be fine."

Zell frowned. "Dude, I don't really want to think about _any _part of her all over some Galbadian soldier's dick-"

Seifer clapped him on the back hard enough to send him stumbling forward up against the bottom step, and Zell whacked his knee with a noisy expletive that brought him spinning back around, both fists up. "What the HELL, man?"

"Let's go." Seifer jerked his head toward the car. "If I can get to the driver's seat first Quistis'll probably be in too much of a hurry to argue about it. It'll take three years to get to the station with her driving. Tell her you won't talk the whole time if she lets me drive."

The screen door banged, and Seifer took off at a dead sprint for the car.

* * *

><p>War makes men of boys.<p>

He is not sure where he first heard this.

He has always been at war, it seems like. It is what he has been groomed for his entire life, and maybe he is not thrilled about it, maybe he does not _enjoy _it, but there is nothing else that he understands.

It takes having a child of his own to understand exactly what Cid Kramer has done to them all. This sleeping blanket-swaddled weight in his arms is the most beautiful thing he has ever seen- it outshines all the memories of her smile he keeps carefully stored away and kindles something inside of him that is not quite anger, because anger has never burned this hot or bright in this nuclear kiln that is his chest-

It is the kind of fury he used to see in Seifer Almasy's eyes, festering rage that sinks little bitter hooks into him and begins to gently pry and pry and pry, trying to pull him apart.

This black-haired blanket-swaddled boy is not going to have a father one day.

One day six-year-old Adan Leonhart is going to stand on a sagging rain-rotten front porch wondering why his father didn't love him enough to come back to him, and there will never be an answer good enough for him.

He shifts one arm out from underneath his son and lets tiny pink-flushed fingers curl reflexively around his thumb and there is suddenly this empty well-echo of a void inside of him that sounds like her laughter-

He has forgotten how to _breathe _staring down at this peacefully sleeping bundle in his arms and it is all the fault of this man with his childhood cottage by the sea pulling weeds from Matron's grave, and from Selphie's-

Squall can see him from here. There is a hand on his back as he stoops over to yank dirt-raining roots from the flower-bordered square that is their cemetery, and he feels all his jaw tendons go cable-winched stiff staring at this man who was supposed to be his father.

He is the reason Squall Leonhart's life is a tangle of KIA notices and black-burned lumps of meat-stinking slabs that used to be friends, and he is so very, very _tired _of it all.

He has a son to come home to now. He has a son with a smile like his grandfather's and friends that he does not want to lose, not when he has already lost so much, and this man pulling weeds who has taken so much from him-

He gets to fade quietly into anonymity in this seaside cottage with his children all around him, the ones he has not yet damaged, and he does not have to worry about little boys who never get to know their fathers, he does not have to _worry _about friends that might become poorly-penned squiggles across the top of his next KIA notice-

His son is smiling at him. His son is smiling at him and suddenly there is nothing else in this world but this boy with his mother's hair stretching a tiny drool-smeared hand up toward his face, and he closes his eyes, he lets that tiny reaching hand bump up against his lips and down across his chin-

And the rage is gone from his heart.

It is that fast, and that final. There is no more room for anything that isn't his son.

"I'm going to be back," he whispers, and he bring his lips down to his son's smoothly unmarred forehead and for a long time he can only stand here like this, holding this child who is the only part of her he has left.

He wonders if this is what his father wanted to promise six-year-old Squall Leonhart on that sagging rain-rotten front porch.

* * *

><p>There is an interstellar explosion inside her head that smears stars winking across her eyes and inside her mouth her tongue is a leather-dried lump that sprays blood against her teeth-<p>

She is not sure how long she's been laying here. Dismembered fragments of other people's lives are the only things she can see, flick flick flicks of foggy splintered snapshots that show her handsome soldier Laguna cramping up in a bar-

Irvine and Selphie holding hands on a sunset-stained dock and prison janitor Ward mopping footprints-

The world is slowly spiraling into focus, threading in and out through all these images she only half-understands and beneath her cheek the ground is a rough cinderblock scrape that hurts her cheek-

She wants Zell.

Her purse is a soggy rain-ruined lump beside her and everything _hurts _and she is so afraid and _please_ just let him find her, please let everything end soon-

These fragmentary snapshots of other people's lives hurt her head, bring her stomach crashing up into her throat and there is a fluid _hic hic hic _that she thinks might be her, trying to breathe blood-

Why does it _hurt _what is _happening _to her-

Her fingers scrabble desperate skin-smearing streaks across the pavement that rip her nails screaming from their beds-

Everything feels like it is screaming her head and her body and the fluid _hic hic hic _in her throat and he is still not here to save her he is still not coming for her- maybe he is _never _coming for her-

She is a shivering frightened child waiting for Raine's soldier to come save her and he is not here and there are talon curves of monster claws that are supposed to be fingernails, digging into her chin-

"Please…_please_…"

She is sprawled out like a sack of trash in an alleyway and there is no one to hear her- she is all alone and she will always _be _all alone in this vacant rain-echoing alleyway that smells like old garbage-

_-you cut a pretty figure up there I'd say you're about a negative three on the manliness scale-_

_-I get scared sometimes scared of waking up somewhere else scared of not seeing Ellone- _

_-Mr. Kitten cause he's got Lionheart so she wanted something feliney-_

Star-speckled interstellar explosion becomes nuclear white-out all around her.

* * *

><p>He has never felt like this before.<p>

The rain is pissing down around them hard enough to leave Seifer in a perpetual state of soggy disgruntled rage- Zell can hear him from here, almost half a block ahead- and somehow he doesn't even feel it. He is vaguely aware of flattened rain-dripping spikes and the suction sup squelch of his clothes fastening up against his skin-

But none of it really _registers_. None of it is an unending gut-shrinking mantra inside his head like those woman's words- _yes she came through here earlier this morning never got on a train though don't know what happened to her she just stumbled off_-

He cannot stop _hearing _that woman's voice and he thinks maybe it is the only thing he will ever hear again- maybe nothing else will make sense to him again except that Ellone is gone and the only thing he can do is stumble through this tiny roadside town praying he runs across her-

He keeps nervously popping his knuckles. They make little cold-stiffened ripples underneath his skin that bring old injuries snarling back to life, and this too has nothing to do with Ellone, so he doesn't give a shit about it.

His feet squeal rubber-soaked drag marks of faltering lead-weight steps that each take a year, that together string into an eternity he watches pass in an eye blink and suddenly he is staggering through Time Compression again, suddenly he is alone in a gray-scorched landscape where nothing makes sense anymore-

_-quistis kinneas selphie yo squall rinoa anyone come on guys where are you-_

He walks for a second an hour a _year_-

His feet raise little dirt-spraying coughs of dust that puff up under his shoes like mist-

Shit he's all alone in here _shit _how the hell does he get out he doesn't want to _be here _anymore-

There is something underneath this storm hissing down all around him, but he doesn't understand it. His feet bring him to a stumbling graceless halt that he's not sure he's in charge of, and somewhere behind him his friends send her name echoing off rain-oiled walls to either side of him-

_-yo quisty thank hyne where's the others huh-_

He stands with one hand on the wall trying to listen, needing to _hear_, but his head's all stuffed up with memories that fog his brain like cotton-

And now he is not fumbling through reaching tentacles of cold heather smog that coil up around him like hands, he is standing under a sky that is not quite dawn-lit and at his feet Seifer Almasy gags a blood-bubbling wheeze of a last breath-

Kinneas rasps a struggling smoke-snarled breath that pumps his chest underneath burned-away tatters of clothes-

He is standing at the mouth of an alleyway, blinking coherence back into his world.

He turns slowly because his stomach cannot handle any sudden motions right now, and this alleyway that is suddenly the only thing he can see is making the noise Almasy kept hiccupping in his arms-

It is Irvine pulling winded gasps of beached-fish pants into seared-away lungs that bring tears stinging to his eyes-

There is a pile of storm-soaked clothing halfway down the alley, and a purse beside it he thinks he recognizes and there are _feet _protruding from that storm-soaked pile and suddenly he is lurching forward even though he cannot remember how to move-

"_Quistis_! _Seifer_!"

This is not his voice. He has never sounded like this before.

He is running-_he is running because he is not alone in here anymore there are voices and they want him to kill his mother they want him to burn the _children-

_-let's get the hell outta' here quisty place gives me the creeps I just wanna go home ya' know-_

The whole world is a watery storm-lit gray and he is afraid to touch her what if she is _dead_-

* * *

><p>Her head is spinning spinning spinning and through flashes of night-black semi-consciousness she sees a piano and a woman and it <em>hurts <em>she can't breathe she can't _see_ Laguna please _save _me-

There is a woman with a pointed knife-glistening smile and a man with a collar that hurts her eyes and they are _hurting _her and _please _she just wants to go _home_-

She wants Raine's soldier to pull her sobbing into his arms where nothing can touch her, where she will be safe and warm and loved and this woman with the shining blood-colored hair cannot touch her-

_-the many faces you've shown me times when you were hurt worried or felt pain deep inside you your smile your face your eyes you've shown me something I think I can come up with a song-_

_- my last night here with you same old songs just once more-_

Deling City is a torch flare in her eyes and along shining rain-wet streets clump blue-uniformed men she thinks she recognizes-

No- the men are from the past and the one bringing up the rear is gone and it's the pavement under her cheek that is rain-wet and she doesn't understand anything that is happening to her except that she is scared and cold and please someone _help _her there are things coming for her in the dark-

* * *

><p>Her name is a frail old-man croak on his lips that tastes like bile, and he lifts her limply flopping into his lap to hold her-<p>

Her eyes roll flickers of white-rimmed blink that spin away like marbles and the layer of red across her lips is blood and not lipstick-

"Ellone! Hey hey hey- Ellone, it's Zell- it's Zell. Can you hear me?"

She is a damp shivering lump in his arms and his next scream for help echoes thundering off the walls and brings Quistis panting to the alleyway with Seifer on her heels and please _help him _he doesn't understand what's _wrong_ with her-

He brushes waterlogged strands of hair from her eyes that hang up on her red-painted mouth and beside him Quistis gropes at Ellone's wrist for the pulse he can just barely feel beating against his arm where it grazes her chest-

"What's wrong with her?" His voice is a shrill panicked squeal in his ears and Seifer's hand is suddenly on his shoulder, pulling him away.

"Come on; let Quistis figure out what's going on. She's better at field med than you, Zell."

"_No_!" The hand on his shoulder is not stronger than his resolve and he yanks himself screaming out from underneath it, her face in his hands. "_Get off me_!"

"Seifer."

"Let _go_, Dincht." The hands are back, underneath his arms this time, and she slides wheezing away from him into Quistis' arms and across his neck is an iron band of a headlock that squeezes stars spiraling across his eyes-

"Get _off _me you bastard! _Get off me_! _Ellone_!"

* * *

><p>Laguna is here to save her. There are no more monster talons of fingernails and frightening red-glowing eyes coming for her in the dark and she blinks a foggy wordless thank you up into his eyes-<p>

His face is surrounded by lank water-dripping spikes of rain-plastered brown that do not belong to him and she pulls another name up from her aching head that brings a smile to her lips-

_Zell_- he came for her she was _hoping _he would show up- he will make everything go away-

Someone is taking him away. Her arms are flaccid doll's limbs that cannot reach out for him but she tries anyway, she wads all her willpower into a tiny nerve-cluster knot that sparks feedback screaming down into her hands-

They give listless twitches that scrape them bleeding across the ground but that's not what she _wanted_-

"Ellone." Someone is saying her name very quietly and calmly.

She doesn't recognize the voice, but she thinks she is supposed to.

"Ellone, it's Quistis. Let him go, Seifer. Zell is here with me. We're going to get you inside where it's warm- be careful, Zell. She might have injuries we can't see yet."

The ground is very far away all of a sudden. Her face is pressed up against a shirt drenched all the way through to the skin, and the chest underneath is very hard and warm and faintly aftershave-scented. She wants to stay here like this forever, where the woman with the pointed knife-glistening smile and the man with the collar that hurts her eyes cannot get her anymore-

"You're gonna' be ok, Ellone. Ok, Ellone? I promise."

She tries to smile with lips gone corpse-stiff, and the only thing she can manage is a listless little gape of her mouth that sends rain drumming up against her teeth.

Her tongue tastes like metal. It's a ragged chewed-up bulge in her mouth that squeezes blood dribbling down her chin but the arms do not seem to mind- they are pressing her closer and she is so very very relieved- _the woman with the bright flame-glowing hair is gone and Uncle Laguna is taking her home now- _

* * *

><p>Quistis sighed and slopped vomit into the peach-tiled bathtub.<p>

Seifer watched her from the doorway, one hip up against the frame and both arms over his chest. "You've got puke in your hair, Instructor."

She set the rinsed-clean wastebasket in her left hand on the floor with another sigh that hunched her shoulders up around her ears, and wiped an arm across her sweat-stippled forehead.

He was smirking at her when she turned to face him. "Want me to help you wash it out?"

"Just the kind of romanticism every girl dreams about." She pushed hair from her eyes and leaned both hands down against her knees, staring contemplatively at her scraped-raw knuckles. She wasn't sure when precisely that had happened- perhaps while she was shifting Ellone around on the pavement. It would have been nice for once to glance down and see soft pink-tipped women's hands and not these scar-mapped soldier's weapons she had carried with her since childhood, but she was not and would never be pretty manicured Rinoa Heartilly. Cid Kramer had made sure of that a long time ago.

Seifer tipped his head toward the small tidily-furnished room of the bed and breakfast Quistis had opted to check into for the night; it was already nearly dark by the time they'd found Ellone, and she had not wanted to travel the two hours back to Garden with her health in such a precarious state, though truthfully she would have welcomed Kadowaki's expertise on the matter, because she certainly didn't understand what was happening. "What's wrong with her?" he asked, unwinding one arm to scratch underneath his chin, his hip not budging from the door frame.

"I'm not sure, to be honest. She said she wasn't sure what happened- she went to the train station to see if any were currently running, and then she started feeling sick all of a sudden and left to look for the station restroom. And then all of a sudden she began having flashbacks to all the pasts she's dipped into- Laguna's mostly, because his were the memories she visited most often, but Irvine as well. She said she couldn't control it and collapsed in the street- she dragged herself out of the open and into the alleyway where we found her, and she said she's not entirely sure what happened after that, but she thinks she just kept slipping in and out of consciousness."

Seifer's scar wrinkled up in a frown. "Did she see anything new? I mean, was she just randomly falling into people's pasts or something?"

"No- she says the only things she saw were scenes she'd already projected people into. She sent Zell a dream about Ward being a prison warden way back at the beginning of the Second Sorceress War, and she remembers seeing that while she was lying in the alleyway. Various other dreams she sent to Squall and the rest of us throughout that time- something about Laguna in a bar and a woman playing the piano…I didn't understand everything she was telling me. She said it's never happened like this before. She's always been in control of it- what she wants someone to see, and when she wants them to see it." Quistis smudged blood from the knee of her pants. "She said it was extremely painful as well, also something that's never happened before. I didn't find any serious injuries, though- the blood on her mouth was from biting down on her tongue."

"So she just flipped her shit?"

"She isn't crazy, Seifer."

His hand crackled a cellophane hiss of a knuckle pop that set her fraying nerves on edge, and he brought that free arm back down into a barrier across his chest, still frowning. "Then what the fuck is she? Nobody understands this shit that she can do anyway- who's to say it's not going to come back and bite us all in the ass one day? Adel wanted her, right? Maybe she's got some kind of connection to the sorceress line. You saw Rinoa- she went crazy just like all those other bat-shit bitches."

"Rinoa was experimented on. Who knows what Odine did to her while she was in his lab."

"Maybe. But we didn't see her for months after dropping her off with Raijin and Fujin- she might have been going downhill long before that crazy fuck got his hands on her. Matron-" He paused and looked down at those fresh-popped knuckles, blood-drained white. "Ultimecia went more and more off the fucking rails as the war went on. She wasn't exactly rational to begin with, but by the end she was nuttier than a goddamned fruitcake. Even completely under her control, there were days I wanted to know what the hell was wrong with the bitch."

"Rinoa was fine for years-"

His right hand where it rested up against his left bicep became a fist, and Quistis cut herself off. "Take it from someone who knows, Instructor. That much power does shit to a person."

"Seifer-"

He cut her off again with a slit-eyed glare that brought her gaze back down to those lumps of soldier's weapons fisted up on her thighs, and she did not say anything else. It was his I-don't-need-your-pity stare, and Squall had taught her long ago not to force a man when he didn't want to talk about his feelings, so she let the silence stretch between them, she let it become a weight across her shoulders that bowed them sagging underneath it-

And suddenly he was crouched in front of her with one hand on his knee and the other on that ragged circle of scar tissue ruining her cheek, his thumb grazing a featherweight arc that brought it flicking up across her temple. "Look, Quistis…I don't want anything to be wrong with her. You think I want to watch her pull a fucking Ultimecia? If something in her was gonna' snap, it probably wouldn't have waited twenty-six years to do so. I'm just saying we should keep an eye on her."

She sighed and slipped a thumb and forefinger under her glasses to pinch the bridge of her nose. "I know. I'm just…Rinoa's gone. Selphie is dead. How many more people do we have to lose?" She looked up at him, frowning. "Zell loves her."

He swept hair back behind her ear, letting his fingers linger. "Yeah, I know."

"So what happens if…"

"If something happens to her? He'll have to figure out a way to sack up and deal with it. If Pubes and the cowboy can do it, so can he."

She did not want him to have to 'sack up.' She wanted the storybook endings she had eaten up as a child for all of them, the ones Matron had fed to clueless orphan boys and girls who had decided the world owed them something after taking away their families. She was tired of death, of watching beardless children of soldiers charge screaming into knots of combat that swallowed them whole, that spit out ragged raw-meat remains of cadets she had cared about-

She was just so very damn _sick _of mercy killings, of coiling Save the Queen up against pale blood-splashed throats flexing in final screams of wordless echoing pain-

She had learned early on to carry a sidearm, so she did not have to touch the soldiers she could not save when she murdered them. She spent most nights trying to forgive herself, to forgive Cid Kramer for turning a little blue-eyed girl chasing waves on a childhood beach into a monster that slaughtered children because she had not been fast enough to help them. She had never learned precisely how to accomplish this, nor did she ever ask any of her friends how they themselves dealt with it-no one talked about it. That was practically the SeeD motto, after all: get in, get the job done no matter what, and keep your mouth shut about anything you had to see or do.

Some nights it made her so angry she could only lie there in bed holding her rage-smoking chest, staring at pristine fresh-washed sheets that always felt so very cold without him lying next to her. Some nights, Quistis Trepe gripped faded bloodstains of memories in a stranglehold that would have made her first unarmed combat instructor proud, and she let them all, each and every one, soak away into those pristine fresh-washed sheets until she could not see them clearly anymore, until they were only sleep-hazed blurs of things she might have seen or done, but probably had not. It was easier with Seifer in the bed beside her; maybe he did not say anything, maybe he only wrapped a scar-knobbed arm around her waist to bring her shivering up against his side, but he was _there_, he was listening if she needed him to, and it was enough.

She slid her hand up over his to trap it warm against her cheek, and closed her eyes with another sigh that brought her into a weary slump against his chest, her head beneath his chin. "I'm tired."

He wrapped both his arms around her back. "Yeah, well, you need a shower first, Instructor."

She smiled faintly into his shirt. "Is there anything else you would like to be brutally honest about? What about my breath? Do I need to brush my teeth? Do these pants make me look fat?"

"You're kind of giving me a hard on rubbing your tits up against me like that."

She pulled back to find him smiling down at her, not his back-of-the-classroom smirk that set her teeth so gratingly on edge, but his genuine smile, the one boy Seifer used to beam freely, the one she glimpsed so rarely now and sometimes forgot about. It crinkled his eyes up at the corners and for just a moment it was the only thing she could see, the only thing that mattered to her, this man who used to be a boy breaking her dolls and giving her sloppy spit-filled mistakes of first kisses.

She smiled back at him and lifted a hand to brush hair from his eyes, and from somewhere inside the main room a door thundered echoing off the wall, startling her away from him hard enough to send her feet sliding out from underneath her. Seifer caught her one-armed around the waist and lifted her easily with him as he stood-did the man bench press sumo wrestlers every morning before breakfast, for Hyne's sake? He handled her as though she weighed little more than the dolls he had taken such delight in destroying as a child.

"Yo! I'm back!"

Seifer kept his arm around her waist and pulled her up into the bathroom doorway beside him. "No shit; you know I can hear your fucking clown feet by the time you reach the bottom of the stairs?"

Zell kicked the door shut behind him with his heel, balancing a Styrofoam tray of steaming paper cups on one hand, a top-folded paper bag in the other. "So I got a raspberry cream for Quisty, some uh…black coffee for me-"

"Stop lying, you asshole. You got another one of those sissy vanilla chais. That's like drinking watered-down bitch beer, Wuss."

"I did not!" Zell snapped. "So a raspberry cream for Quisty, a black coffee for me-"

Seifer sniffed the air exaggeratedly. "Smells like your pants are on fire, Chicken Wuss."

"Shut _up_, Alm_ass_y! Quisty, tell him to shut up! _Any_way, raspberry cream for Quisty, black coffee for me-"

"Do you have to run through the whole fucking list all over again every time? No matter how many times you say it, we all know you don't drink your coffee like a man."

Quistis dipped an elbow into his side. "Stop interrupting him, or we'll be here all night."

"Tch."

"-and I got Ellone some ginger tea stuff the lady at the café said would be good for nauseous and stuff-"

"Nausea, Zell," Quistis corrected.

Seifer sneered and returned her elbow. "'Stop interrupting him, or we'll be here all night, Instructor.'"

"-and uh…let's see…couple a' sandwiches for me…some soup for Ellone-"

"Did you get me anything?" Seifer interrupted, slipping his arm from around Quistis' waist to wind it around the other across his chest.

"Pfft. Like you deserve anything, man. But since I'm a way better person than you, I got you this." He set the tray down on the hand-polished mahogany dresser to his left and tossed something across the room to Seifer; his hand flashed out from the crook of his elbow to catch it and Zell snickered as he began to paw through the bag he was holding. "I figured you could use it tonight. Since you're not getting any."

Quistis rolled her eyes. Seifer was holding a particularly notorious men's magazine with a topless woman posing on the cover, a ribbon-wrapped top hat positioned strategically in front of her groin.

"Who says I'm not getting any tonight?"

"Not in front of _me _you're not, dude. Sides, Ellone's sick enough without seeing your dong."

Huddled into a miserable ball on the blanket-snarled bed in the corner, Ellone did not even twitch at this conversation; she was probably dead asleep, fortunately enough for her. Quistis wished she could be so lucky.

She slid the magazine out of Seifer's hands and disposed of it in the bathroom wastebasket. "Actually, Zell, I paid for two rooms. There isn't enough space in here for all of us to comfortably spend the night. We should be leaving, actually. Thank you for the coffee."

"Huh?" His jaw sagged; he handed Quistis her drink with a long slow blink of a disbelieving stare, and rocked forward onto his toes with both hands in his pockets. "You're gonna' leave me here alone with her? What do I do if she wakes up?"

"Put her in a sleeper hold until she passes back out again. She'll thank you if it saves her from having to look at your face."

Quistis ignored Seifer's jab. "You know as much about her condition as I do, Zell. She'll be all right, I think. She's just nauseated and has a migraine now; she hasn't had any more flashbacks for the last couple of hours."

He followed Seifer and Quistis to the door, his face twisted up in a grimace that almost made her feel sorry for him. "Whoa, hey…I mean, am I supposed to sleep in here with her and stuff? There's only one bed."

"There's a floor," Quistis suggested pragmatically. "If you're uncomfortable about sharing the bed. She shouldn't be left alone right now, though. Hopefully she'll just sleep through the rest of the night. I'm sure you can handle it."

Seifer shut the door rudely in his face, cutting off the martial artist's next fumbling excuse and getting a handful of Quistis' ass as they walked out into the empty hallway; she jumped just slightly as he slipped up behind her, and relaxed into his side as he fastened his teeth around her earlobe and flicked his tongue out just long enough to drag a shiver rippling down her spine. "Couldn't wait to get me alone, huh, Instructor?"

"I did it more for Zell than for us."

"What do you mean?"

"You're right. He needs to get laid."

There was a long moment of stunned-silent disbelief, and then suddenly Seifer burst out laughing. "Did you really just fucking say what I think you said?" He leaned in to kiss the corner of her rueful little smile, and slid his hand up from that handful of ass to the curve of one hip. "Dincht better buy you a hell of a lot more of those raspberry cream latte thingama whatever-the-fuck-they-are."

She smiled and brought her cup to her lips.

* * *

><p><em>-rinoa are you still there rinoa talk to us rinoa you have to stay awake ok we need you to stay awake-<em>

There is a flicker of star-smear between her lashes that brings her head twitching up from its chin-tucked slump, and this movement shoots new meteor tails of semi consciousness spinning across her eyes-

_-rinoa are you listening to us rinoa remember the children the children need to burn we're going to burn them ok we're going to burn squall for betraying us the knight's not supposed to do that rinoa you know what we have to do rinoa-_

She is staring through the window of her prison.

There is nothing outside and yet somehow she can still see little spiraling ghosts of this man she thinks she knows, this blank-faced blue-eyed soldier with the keloid ripple of forehead scar she wants to smooth a frown from-

_-rinoa listen to us rinoa are you _listening _to us-_

She does not understand what's going on. Where is the soldier? He is supposed to protect her- this is what she consistently knows, even if she does not always remember his name.

_-no remember what he did rinoa he's why you're here because he didn't protect you the way he was supposed to you can't trust him now-_

But he _loves _her, doesn't he, this soldier with the scar-hatched knuckles that fold into monochromatic lumps of fists beside his hips-

_-no he doesn't rinoa not enough to save you not enough to find a way for the two of you to be together he left you here all alone he put you in this prison cell and he wants you to stay forever he doesn't want to see you anymore-_

Her hands scrape chalkboard squeals of frantic scrabbling disbelief off steel-jointed plexiglass, and inside her head there's a coil of gunmetal fog that puffs up around her feet-

He is here somewhere she has to _find _him he promised he would always come for her and somewhere in this barren gray-swirled landscape he is waiting for her-

_-he's just waiting for you to die now rinoa he doesn't _want _you anymore-_

"No," she whispers. She does not want to _hear _anymore. "That's not true. He said-"

_-he lied rinoa they all lie sooner or later do you remember the blonde boy he was a betrayer too we have to burn them all rinoa we're going to get free ok we're going to get free and we're going to make them _pay _for hurting us-_

"I don't want to."

_-you don't want to make him pay for hurting you rinoa you don't want to make him feel the way you do now lost and alone and scared it's not fair that you're here and he's not-_

"Exuro liberi?"

_-yes rinoa that's right burn the children we need to burn the children the liberi fatali and we promise we're going to make them pay we promise we're going to make them _hurt _ok-_

She is so _tired _and her head hurts and she just want to go home, ok? She just wants to go _home_.

_-you will rinoa you can but you're not _listening _to us rinoa you need to listen to us-_

His face is a flat holograph shimmer of triple digit heat mirage in front of her, and she is not sure what it means, she is not sure what his eyes are trying to tell her and inside her head the voices are arguing again, the voices are trying to make her _hate _him-

And she leans her forehead down against the arctic curve of that steel-molded plexiglass, she tries to send the voices spinning away like flashes of falling stars outside her window-

They are not listening to her and against her palms her nails scrape burn-blisters of red-swollen friction marks that hurt her fingers and she wants them all to just _stop _she needs to _think_-

There is a reptilian hiss of vent-recycled air reaching down to take away the voices, and around her the world darkens to a thin lash-filtered slit of black that becomes soundless white nothing.


	7. Interlude Three

_Dear Selphie,_

_You might not recognize me anymore- not quite as pretty as I used to be. Had a run-in with some Galbadians and some explosives- just one of those frickin things about being a soldier, you know? _

_Needless to say, I got a lot of time to think, laying around here in this infirmary letting the doc nurse me back to health. Getting your face re-arranged and your legs practically blown off and your lungs burned all to shit makes you put a few things in perspective, and the one thing I keep coming back to Selphie honey is why do I have to be here? Why me? What's the whole damn _point _of all of this?_

_Sometimes I'm kinda fuzzy on the details. Like, what even started the whole damn war? I don't mean all the hype over Esthar and B. Garden supporting sorceresses, but that very first spark, you know? The point where maybe we could have stopped all of this before it even started, before I lost you and Seifer had to let go of the only two friends he ever really had at Garden til the rest of us decided maybe he wasn't such an asshole after all._

_Things start to get kinda hazy once you're on the inside of it all, but you know, I thought about it, and I think it's like that for everyone, you know? Once you're in the middle of the fighting, you don't care about how it started or why you're there- you just want to know when it's gonna be over and when you're gonna get to go home. You want to get out before you're a monster that smells like one of Dincht's overcooked hot dogs. _

_It hurts the way people look at me sometimes, Selphie. Almasy tells me I'm getting better that I'm 'almost back to lookin like a damn girl,' and maybe I am- maybe I look a hell of a lot better than when they first brought me in, but I've seen the cadets that don't give a damn about how I'm doin hanging around outside the doors- they're just here for the freak show, to see if the war really dared touch one of the heroes, and it's funny because I used to sorta puff up a little when people looked at me you know- I was good-looking and they knew it and I knew it and it was a nice ego stroke…and now I just wish they'd stop looking._

_Now I wish nobody would ever look at me again. I'm afraid to see a mirror again, Selphie. It's stupid as hell, cryin about my vanity like that, but it's like I had one thing left- you got taken from me and Rinoa's gone and tomorrow I might lose somebody else, but at least when I looked in the mirror I saw a guy people could look up to. I saw Irvine the Good Guy, Kinneas the Fated Hero, and maybe you know and I know I'm just a regular guy underneath it all, maybe I'm not as brave as I should be or as selfless or as good but after the war I used to see my face plastered all over magazines and newspapers and they were all talking about what a hero I was, what a hero we _all _were, and I liked the illusion. I liked the lie. Public doesn't have to know I put my pants on one leg at a time and I can't shoot pool worth shit and I get made fun of for laughing like a girl, right? _

_Used to be when I put on my duster and my hat, when I had Exeter in my hand I felt like that guy on the covers of those magazines- I felt like maybe if I believed it the way everyone else did, I was going to be that hero and not some guy who couldn't pull the trigger when he should have._

_I could have stopped all of this way back at the beginning of it all, at that parade where I didn't have the nuts to do what had to be done. If I'd taken the shot earlier, the war could have ended right there, and you know, there are days when I feel the weight of that just hanging there over my head, waiting to drop. _

_I want that magazine cover guy back, even if he's not real. I want _you _back, Selphie, I want my damn hat and my hair and a thousand other stupid little things and shit I'm crying again. Some soldier I am. I feel like all I do is lie around and whine about how unfair everything is while the real heroes are out there getting the job done no matter what, and sometimes it makes me feel like maybe Kadowaki should just pull the plug now and get this all over with. _

_I've got new lungs, did I tell you? The blast burned up the old ones, so now I've got these prosthetic things and I've gotta be on this machine for a while until Kadowaki's sure the implants are working properly, and I've never told anyone else this because I've done enough whining and cryin as it is, but Selph- they hurt like a bitch. Every time I take a breath…feels like I'm getting stabbed. Maybe it's just my imagination, cause it feels like I never quite left that truck sometimes- I remember lying there staring up at that sky thinking I was going to get to see you soon and I was happy if you can believe that- I was happy and scared shitless but I knew if I got to see you again it was all going to be worth it. _

_When I woke up back at Garden, there was this moment where I just wanted to tell the doc not to bother- I was done with it all, tired of it all, you know? And then here's Almasy sitting next to me dead asleep, and Zell on the other side of the bed and I couldn't believe these two idiots stayed all night in those shitty plastic chairs waiting to see if I was going to wake up. Then in walks Squall a little while later, lookin like someone just sack punched the poor guy and I'm lying there trying so hard to let go, and I look up at him and he doesn't say a word- you know how he is. _

_But he pulls up a chair next to Zell, and he meets my eyes and he gives me this nod, and I know he's probably got a million other things to worry about right then, but he's in the infirmary anyway and all I can think is the guy just lost Rinoa- not really fair of me to go adding to that, is it? _

_I don't know how long he or Almasy or Dincht stayed that first night, but they kept popping back in periodically, showing up to bring me hot dogs or play cards or just talk to me- Seifer, you know, he'd try to make it sound like he had nothing better to do, like I won out over sitting around with his thumb up his ass but just barely and man, he's a horrible liar. He's not such a bad guy, once you get past all the homosexual comments and the sneer and the whole being an asshole thing. Funny thing about Almasy is I always used to think he just cared about himself, but that ain't true- mostly it is, but when he decides you're one of the few people he should bother to give a shit about, he'll tear down the whole world trying to save your ass. I know what happened with Ultimecia was mostly her manipulating him, jerking his mind around, but sometimes I think…hell, sometimes I'm pretty sure that underneath it all he was just trying to protect his mother. _

_I'll talk to you soon Selphie. I love you._

_Love,_

_Irvine_


	8. Chapter Four

**A/N: As always, thanks to my awesome reviewers. Trishika, it is a little funny that this story makes your day a good one considering how harsh it can be at times, but I'm glad it does; I enjoy writing it. Dee, thanks as always for your uplifting comments, and sulou, lots of love for all the review spam you've left here and on Ashes. It's the good kind of spam. If I missed anyone I do apologize, though I think I've caught up with everyone since my last update. I would have posted this sooner, except I was too busy writing the actual story to get around to updating-but that's a good thing, right? I just broke 90,000 words tonight. **

**Chapter Four**

Shelly's Bed and Breakfast

Centra

Midnight had painted the view outside his window into a flat black canvas when she finally woke up.

He'd spent the majority of the last three hours nervously shadow-boxing his way around the room and periodically checking to make sure she was still breathing- Laguna'd kill him if Ellone clocked out on his watch, and not nicely either; Zell was still not entirely sure the man didn't really have those D-District-inspired torture rooms he was always happily and graphically describing whenever the subject of Zell dating his beloved niece happened to come up. Quistis assured him no, Seifer insisted he had personally seen them. Made more sense to believe Quisty of course, but ya' know, there was that one doohickamabob that rumor had it could put enough electrical voltage into a man's penis to render his doodle- wait, Irvine'd told him not to use that word- his schlong- he was pretty sure that one was ok-completely unusable. He couldn't afford to trust Quisty _that _much.

He let his feet slide squeaking across the floor, throwing jabs.

Beneath sleep-rumpled bedcovers Ellone murmured a long dry hiss of a sigh and brought an arm flopping up across her eyes, cracking one of them blearily. He noticed her staring at him two tightly-chambered sidekicks into his kata, and came to a hesitant feet-shuffle of a halt with one hand in his pocket and the other knotted up in the hair at the nape of his neck. "Uh…hey. Feelin' better?"

That arm gave a feeble twitch of an eye wipe that smeared sleep from between her lashes, and something that might have been a smile made a hesitant flicker of an appearance across her lips.

Ah, man. That smile, ya' know- it just _did _something to him. It was the nicest thing in his life, ya' know? Maybe his days were filled with fluid blood-foaming hacks of last breaths that scraped rasping around splintered bone- maybe his nights became shadow-sketched flashbacks of these battlefield images that kept him tossing and turning underneath twists of sheet that wrapped his waist like knots of ligature-

But that smile never changed. He'd watched it blossom on a sun-freckled face underneath a shining cloud-patched sky that held echoes of children's laughter, and it'd been all corner-crinkled eyes and bleach-gleam of immaculate white teeth- and there'd never been any shadows behind it. Sometimes it felt like his life was one long ugly smear of blood and shit and magic-shaved halves of skulls grinning up at him-

And yet none of it seemed to touch her; he'd never quite understand that. He'd see her up to her ankles in that blood and shit and magic-shaved halves of skulls administering Curaga shots and wrapping wounds and smiling down at half-conscious lumps of soldier meat that were probably half in love with her by the time it was all over- and she'd just kneel there smudging away tears with a sleeve and smiling through it all, and she really _believed _it was all going to get better, you know? One day they'd all turn a corner and that light at the end of the tunnel was gonna' be there waiting for them- you just had to keep stumbling toward it. She'd always believed that- pretty soft-voiced 'Sis' holding his hand on the front porch after Seifer had been mean to him, wiping tears from his face and telling him a story about magic castles and beautiful princesses waiting to be saved and how you always just had to hang onto that _hope_, because one day something was gonna' reward it.

Seifer called it naiveté, but you know…he thought it was sweet. Kinda' nice, letting yourself believe there was something more to life than fractured larynxes and bullet-sheared sides of faces, flashing skeletal blood-smeared grins.

She coughed a reply up out of her throat. "My head doesn't hurt as much."

"Yeah? That's…uh…that's good, you know." He scratched his tattoo, looking away.

"Where are Seifer and Quistis?"

Probably scaring the shit out of their neighbors- they struck him as the type of couple that went at it like they were killing each other and _maaaan_, that wasn't a mental image he needed in his head. Stupid Almasy, rubbing his sex life in Zell's face when the most company he had at night were Irvine's snores rumbling down the hallway like a damn semi firing to life. It wasn't even really _fair _ya' know, because the only reason Almasy was even with Quistis in the first place was thanks to that date Zell had strong-armed him into going on, so who the hell was _he _to make all those comments about undescended testicles anyway? Fuck that guy.

"Uhhh…Quisty got 'em their own room. She wanted me to keep an eye on you, case you needed anything. You want somethin' to drink? I got this ginger tea stuff from a café down the road but it's cold now…I can heat it up in the microwave or something if you want. Supposed to help your stomach."

She lifted herself onto an elbow, blinking sleepily. "No thank you."

"Want anything to eat?"

Ellone shook her head, brushing hair back behind one ear. "No; I'm not hungry."

"Oh. Kay." Good thing- he'd already eaten all the sandwiches. He was kinda' wondering what he'd been planning to do if she said yes. There were some mints in a dish in the bathroom- how much did girls need to eat anyway?

He scratched his tattoo again. "So…uh…I mean, if you're doing ok and all I can just leave."

He saw her lift an eyebrow as she propped herself struggling upright on the other elbow. "Where are you going to stay? Is there another room available? It's a little late, isn't it?"

"Well, I could sleep in the hallway- or maybe in the bathtub or something. I can sleep anywhere- this one time me an' Irvine were on this mission hunting down this one monster outside of FH- it was killing a bunch of people's pets and stuff and finally they called us in when some of the kids started to go missing- so we're out there looking for this thing and we're running on hardly any sleep and Irvine goes poking off into this cave we find a little ways outside of town, right? And he wants me to check over on the other side of it, so I do, and next thing I know he's kicking me because I fell asleep while I was looking through this bush-"

"Zell," Ellone interrupted, and that hesitant flicker of a smile made its way across her lips again. "You can stay here. I don't mind."

Something that tasted a lot like his heart thudded up into his throat, and he took his left hand out of his pocket to nervously crack his knuckles. "Really? Ok. Gimme one of those pillows, you know, whichever one you're not using- I can sleep on the floor. I don't mind."

"There's plenty of room for both of us in the bed."

"Whoa! Uh- you want me to sleep with you?" He felt a prickle of sweat crawl tickling across his palm, and smeared it jerkily down one leg of his pants, folding all ten fingers together again to pop them with a nimble gunshot twist of a wrist flick that echoed in the silence.

"Well, not like _that_." A faint blush stained both cheeks, and he felt heat like a rash spread up from his neck and empty out into his own face.

"Yeah! No, like- I knew that. I didn't mean that either. I'm just- uh…sometimes I fall asleep watching TV so I'm still on the couch when Irvine gets up in the morning and he says I drool all over myself and a lot of times I wake up on the floor 'cause I roll around a lot and stuff and this one time-"

"Zell." She was smiling again. "I don't mind. I'd…like the company." Her brow crinkled into a frown that made him want to wipe whatever had caused it off the planet. "I'm just…I'm a little afraid, you know? I don't know what's going on, and I could hear Seifer and Quistis talking earlier, while you were gone…"

"What'd they say?"

She shook her head. "They didn't realize I was awake. They wouldn't have said anything if they'd known I could hear them. It doesn't really matter, anyway. I'm just…well…could you just sit with me for a while at least? Even if you're not going to stay?"

His right leg jumped spastically. Musta' picked that up off that jerk Laguna- too many Ellone-induced flashbacks into the guy's bumbling past. At least the guy's complete inability to interact with women hadn't rubbed off on him. Well, 'cept with Ellone…but it was only because she wouldn't stop _smiling _at him- what kinda' guy was a match for that?

"Sure." It came out somewhere between a bark and a pre-pubescent squeak, and he considered putting his face through the wall and just leaving it there. Man, he was such a _fuckin' _idiot.

He sat down on the edge of the bed like it might bite him, and bent over to unlace his shoes.

His slide backward was a long slow slither of a thing that plastered his spine up against the headboard and left his legs sticking rigidly out in front of him, and he caught a peripheral shot of Ellone's palm-smothered laugh that hunched both shoulders stiffly up around his ears and brought his hands together in another clammy prayer knot of a fist clench.

"I don't bite, Zell," she teased him softly, reaching out to straighten the sleeve of his shirt where it had snagged on the headboard and bunched up in a way that was either aesthetically unpleasant to her, or an excuse to touch him. Her fingers left a lingering scorch-trail across his shoulder that shifted him subtly away from her, and she dropped her hand.

"So uh- what have you been up to lately?" He rubbed the back of his neck, popped his knuckles again, and pasted what he hoped was a look appropriately devoid of dumbfuckery on his face. She just made him so damn _nervous_.

"It's a little cold in here," she said, ignoring his question.

"Huh? Yeah, I guess- maybe the window's open a crack or something; I'll go check-" She halted his scramble toward the end of the bed with a hand against his back that pushed shivers rippling down his spine, and he froze like that, blinking.

"I was hoping you would…um- I just thought that maybe you could…" She coughed a faintly embarrassed tremor from her voice, and her hand against his back became a fist. He felt all his muscles knot up around the soft unscarred humps of her knuckles and fisted a handful of blanket in his right palm. Gave him something to concentrate on, because he was thisdamnclose to blurting out something stupid, to just spilling his stupid little heart all over these blankets he was clutching like they were the last hot dog of the day, and if he was being honest with himself here, he was just kidding himself-

Why the hell would Ellone want some idiot with a height complex and the body count of a mass murderer, a guy who spent most of his life calculating precise arcs of jugular shots and matchstick breaks of knee joints folding the wrong way when she could have _anyone_, when she could have a nine-to-fiver in a suit coming home to tell her about his day with their daughter dangling from one hand and his briefcase from the other-

He swung his feet out over the side of the bed and hopped down onto the floor, Trabian-cold under his toes.

She pulled her knees up under her chin, bringing the blankets with them. "Did I do something wrong, Zell?"

He turned to face her with his hands in his pockets, and the look on her face reminded him of this one time he'd tagged Seifer in the balls while they were sparring, like all the air had suddenly just hissed wheezing from her body, and inside his chest his heart gave an uncomfortable little wrench that made him want to throw up. "What? No-" He dropped back down to the bed on his knees, flaring his hands palm-down across the covers. "I just, you know-"

"It's all right." She attempted another of those smiles that fell flat, that sloughed faltering from her mouth before it could even really begin, and he transferred his hands from the bed to his thighs, sitting back on his heels. "I think I got the wrong idea about a couple of things."

"Like what?"

Ellone shook her head. She wore a smile that did not slip this time, brightly false. "It's not important. But…could you still stay, please? I'm…I have nightmares sometimes. About Adel and the things-" She cut herself off and shook her head again. "It doesn't matter anymore. That was a long time ago. But what happened today…I saw some things I wanted to forget." She turned a pair of doe eyes on him that reduced him to a sissy sniveling little puddle at her feet, and he swallowed hard enough to coax the bile in his throat back down into his gut.

"Yeah…uh- course. I mean, I'm always here if you need me. I love you, Ellone. As a friend! You know, in the way friends love each other, like, I love Quisty and Irvine and even sometimes Squall and Seifer when they're not being twizzledicks- uh, you mind if I say twizzledicks? But yeah, so as your friend, I'm always gonna' be here. If you need to talk or something."

Her smile twisted into a thin flat line of disappointment, and he fumbled one hand awkwardly into his left pocket, yanking out a wrapped piece of candy from the folds of liner it had become tangled up in. "Hey- I took a bunch of these from the front desk. This is my last one- you want it? It's caramel." _I'm a retard I'm a retard I'm a retard I'm a retard I'm a retard._

"No thank you."

Zell shoved it back into his pocket and sat there for a moment trying not to stare at her. "You uh…you still cold?"

She flashed the same shining counterfeit smile he didn't buy for a moment and slid back down underneath the covers far enough to graze her feet against his knees; he shifted sideways to give her room and swung his legs around to drape them crosswise around one another, frowning. "No. I'm all right now."

"Oh. Ok."

The silence between them became a frail old rubber band of a thing, straining tight around the edges.

She broke it a moment later, not looking at him. "Am I really just a friend to you?"

"Well, not 'just'; I mean, you're one of my closest friends, and you're a lot prettier than Almasy or Kinneas."

She let her eyes slide shut, and smiled just a little. "Prettier than Irvine? I'm not sure about that."

"Yeah- you're prettier than anyone I've ever seen before. Well, uh, I mean maybe not _that _pretty- I mean, it's not like I'm a stalker or I started a fan club like the Trepies or something and I mean...uh you're really pretty compared to a lot of these girls I see at Garden 'cause some of them go a little too far with the whole being a soldier thing and they stop shaving and they don't pluck their eyebrows or anything and this one girl shaved her head and she's got this real weird-shaped head-"

"Zell."

"Huh? Yeah, sorry. You probably wanna' sleep, huh?"

"It's late. Why don't you go to bed too?"

"Sure." He clenched his sweaty hands on his knees. "You want me to go get in the bathtub? Just don't let Almasy turn it on in the morning or something if he and Quisty come back before I wake up."

"Zell, you really don't have to sleep in the bathtub."

"No, I'm fine- I mean, I want to. Ma made me sleep in it one time because I drew all over my bed with permanent marker and then accidentally lit it on fire- the bed, not the permanent marker- so she made me sleep in the bathtub with the dog as punishment, and man, I loved that dog, but he used to fart so much you could, like, die trying to hold your breath long enough to let 'em pass. But anyway, I don't mind sleeping in the bathtub- it kinda' reminds me of home. I miss Ma a lot, so it'd probably be nice, you know?"

She was stifling something underneath her hand again, and he began to tap a nervous little drum roll of a finger twitch across his knees. "So…good night, I guess."

Ellone pushed herself back into sitting position, letting the covers slither down across her stomach to pool loosely in her lap. "Please; just stay. I don't mind."

His hands spasmed into a fist, flickered open, and then clenched once more. "Well, see, I normally sleep in my underwear because it's uncomfortable sleeping in pants and all-"

She buried a smile in her palm. "I'm sure I can handle it. Uncle Laguna is a little absentminded sometimes when it comes to wearing pants. Unless you're wearing something embarrassing? I think it was Seifer that mentioned something to me about a tuxedo thong-"

"_No_! That guy's a lying asshole; I'm a boxers guy all the way."

Ellone crossed her arms and wrinkled her face up into a credible imitation of Squall's disapproving look, pursing her lips. "I'm not sure about that now. I think you're going to have to show me."

He stammered out something that didn't even make sense to his own ears, wiping both hands down the sides of his pants again.

"I'm joking, Zell." She held the covers open with a smile, nodding her head toward them. "Let's just go to sleep, all right? I'm sure Quistis will want to get an early start in the morning." She reached over with her free hand to turn off the lamp on the stand beside the bed, and the sudden smear of black this wiped pinwheeling across his eyes gave him the pair he needed to slide down under those blankets next to her, his heart hammering in his ears.

She was very warm. And soft. And she smelled nice, like a girl and not the sweaty gym reek of tent-packed male he'd spent the last several months inhaling-

She laid her head down against his shoulder.

He went spring-coiled tense, and both hands became arthritically-stiff gnarls of claw that burrowed shaking into the sheets underneath him-

"Relax," she whispered sleepily. "Please, Zell. I'm not trying to put any pressure on you. I just need some company."

Her lashes threw long stripes of shadow in the sallow ghost-light that dripped sporadically through the blinds, and he counted off breathing techniques to himself as her inhalations began to wind down into soft sleep-measured hisses against his shoulder. He lifted his arm slowly, experimentally, and her head slid down onto his chest, just under his chin; he brought it slowly down over her shoulders to pull her more tightly up against him, and when she did not twitch, he let himself relax, just slightly.

He could feel her lips against his chest.

He leaned over to check her face very carefully for signs of feigned slumber, and when he found none, he pressed his lips down very gently against the top of her head, and left them there for a very long time.

* * *

><p>He walked two scar-smudged fingers up her naked back to her shoulder, and brought the rest of his hand curving forward around her arm to pull it back against his lips.<p>

"Think Wuss has nailed her yet?"

Quistis rolled over with a sigh, letting one hand trail up his stomach to the ragged circle of pink-puckered tissue that was his latest addition to the frayed collage of battle marks his body had become. She leaned down to kiss it and laid her head across his chest, tucking it beneath his chin. "I highly doubt that."

"Yeah, I was just kidding. He's gonna' be a virgin until he dies."

Quistis flared her palm open across his bare ribs. "I don't understand why he doesn't just tell her how he feels."

Tch. Simple as that, huh- acquire feelings, reveal feelings, live happily ever after; objective after objective like just one more fucking mission. Funny thing was, as straightforward and clean-cut as the whole thing seemed laid out like that, it left out a huge damn chunk of the story, all the alternate endings the fairytales had never warned you about. Maybe the guy was supposed to get the girl- maybe that was what destiny or some shit like that had ordained, and there you were just buzzing right the fuck along your path to greatness when suddenly the road gave an earthquake shiver underneath your feet that cracked the ground like an egg and tossed you screaming into volcanic heat that chewed your legs smoking from your goddamned fucking hip sockets-

Maybe the princess didn't want to get on your goddamned horse. Maybe your dick was too small or your nose too big, or maybe she just batted for the other team.

He used to tell himself the worst thing they could say was no, and who the hell in their right mind would say no to Seifer Almasy anyway? And then he had met the one woman who could say no, who _would _say no, and suddenly it was the most heinous fucking word in the world; suddenly he had convinced himself maybe panting like a bitch in heat was not so bad after all, maybe it was undignified as hell but shit, it wasn't like anyone else had to know, and it was a whole lot fucking better than getting his heart curb-stomped by one of Quistis Trepe's immaculately shining fucking boots.

So he got Zell's noticeable lack of testicles when it came to all things Ellone, y'know. Didn't mean he wasn't going to give the guy shit about it, but things just weren't as fucking simple for guys like him and Zell Dincht as Trepe's orderly little mind perceived them to be. Normal men went off to work in suits and ties and toe-scuffed loafers that on a bad day got a little mud on them. He and Wuss got shit done with neck breaks and heart shots and throat strikes that smashed men gagging to their knees, and maybe today they were still breathing, maybe right now they were still goddamned _alive_-

But tomorrow they might not be. Tomorrow they might be one of those men stumbling gagging to their knees, and the last thing you wanted to see while you were dying in the fucking mud was some bitch's face wrinkling up in disgust because you'd just poured your goddamned heart out to her. Normal men sulked and drank and fucked random bar chicks with more STDs than brain cells, scraped themselves out of the pathetic little holes they'd dug themselves, and moved the hell on with their lives.

Men like him and Zell…sometimes they just kicked the fucking bucket. Nicer to pretend somewhere out there was the woman you loved, silently pining away and chewing her pretty little nails all to shit because she gave a fuck if you didn't come back.

Sometimes he felt like he was still pretending.

He tipped his face forward to kiss Quistis on the head, and watched his fingers trail slowly down her shoulder toward the curve of one naked breast. "He's a pussy."

"He's just shy, Seifer."

"Fucking- Instructor, if I ever see any evidence that babbling fucking moron is 'shy' I will personally hand you my left nut. He never goddamned shuts up. And he's got no fucking shame- the other day he whipped out his fucking thing because he thought something was wrong with it and wanted me to take a look at it."

"I would rather pass on that, if you don't mind. I'd be perfectly content with a simple 'you were right, Quistis'," she said dryly. "Are you ever going to move beyond calling me that?"

"What?"

"Instructor. If you notice, I haven't been yours for a long time."

"I like it. Teachers are a real common theme in porns anyway; it makes me all horny thinking about you giving me private detention."

"You had plenty of those and I don't recall anything particularly interesting happening."

He smirked. "That's not what I used to tell people in the locker room. As far as most of Garden is concerned, you've been banging me since I was a cadet. On your desk; on some of the student's desks. The floor. Janitor's closet, one time. And yeah, you did some real kinky shit with that whip. If the teacher won't actually bang you, telling everyone she did is almost as good."

He could feel her shake her head against his chest. Seifer flicked his hand lazily up her ribcage to send the skin flinching back from his fingers, and cupped her left breast in one palm. "Cold, Instructor?"

"A little. Put your hands back under the blankets."

"I meant you." He arced his thumb across the peak of one cold-pebbled nipple, and brought the blanket slithering up to enfold them both. "You ever think about fucking me when I was your student? Even just for a few seconds?"

"Usually I was too busy trying not to strangle you. When I first met you- back before I remembered that we had grown up as children- I thought you were very cute, in the sort of way girls just beginning to notice boys did. And then you opened your mouth, and ruined it."

"You were in the infirmary getting stitched up, and I came in bleeding all over my fucking uniform- some asshole broke my nose- and I asked who broke your sandcastle this time and what did the other guy look like or something like that. And you didn't even know what I was talking about." It had felt like another shot to the face, watching those pretty blue eyes regard him blankly, like he was just one more fucking stranger passing her in the hall, and he remembered breaking some very expensive shit after establishing Quistis Trepe didn't have one goddamned clue who he was. Mainly, a couple of collarbones and one pretty boy face that resulted in said pretty boy's immediate removal from Garden by the stuck-up parents that showed up to take the whining little bastard home because he'd gotten blood all over the pricey uniform they had the kid's own personal butler clean and press everyday. The fuck had they thought he was getting into, anyway? Stock market shares?

"No one remembered, except you. And Irvine, of course. I always wondered why you hated Squall so much."

His shrug shifted her head from his chest up onto his shoulder, and he combed his fingers down through the sex-tangled coils of her hair. "Didn't have anything to do with that asshole not recognizing me. I just don't like his face. Why do you think I messed it up like that?"

"Speaking of Squall-"

"I'd rather fucking not."

"I called him earlier, to let him know we'd found Ellone," Quistis went on, ignoring him. "He wanted to leave Cid's and come see her, but I told him she was fine now and that he could see her in a few days when he comes back to Garden. Laguna and Kiros are supposed to visit Adan tomorrow, so long as everything holds stable in Esthar, and Squall decided not to alarm Laguna by making a big deal out of this. He'll panic if he finds out what happens to Ellone; for the moment I think it would just be best to keep him in the dark. If any more problems come up, then I think it would be wise to let him know, but other than that, I don't see any harm in letting this just slip by."

"And I fucking care why?"

Quistis sighed. "You don't have to get so worked up just because I happened to mention his name. He is my friend, Seifer, whether you like it or not. I still don't understand where your concern comes from- he is still completely hung up on Rinoa, and probably always will be."

"You're so goddamned blind it's not even funny."

"Excuse me?"

"Nothing," he snapped, taking his hand from her breast to bring it up across his eyes, scowling. "But why don't you fucking think about how long I was hung up on you and how you were completely fucking clueless until you basically got beaten over the head with it. You think you're so goddamned smart, but when it comes to shit like this, you're not even the top of the fucking special ed class."

She twisted her neck around to spear a glare up into his eyes, both arms coming up to settle across her breasts. "I hardly think one instance of poor judgment qualifies me for a helmet in the corner."

"Which was the poor judgment- not figuring out I was in love with you for almost a fucking year, or deciding to lower yourself far enough to actually date me?"

"I'm still deciding," she snapped back, and then sighed and rubbed the bridge of her nose beneath her glasses. "Seifer, stop. I don't want to fight."

"Maybe I do."

He heard her tone soften just slightly. "You only want to fight because you're always convinced it will end in make-up sex."

"Are you saying it won't?"

She flipped herself over to straddle both his knees, one hand sliding up the soft blond-matted down of his thigh to parts of his anatomy that shorted his brain out like someone had flicked a little fucking switch inside his brain. "We don't have to fight first, you know."

Point to Trepe. He fisted both hands in her hair as she disappeared beneath the covers, and his toes curled up underneath him hard enough to dent the sheets beneath his feet; the little teeth-thinned hiss he let out between his lips became a ragged wheeze of a moan that burned his throat and wiped everything that wasn't her mouth on his dick from his brain, and he let his eyes flicker closed as she settled into a rhythm that arched his hips up toward her mouth.

Fuck it. Leonhart wasn't getting head from a woman who had to be fastidiously fucking perfect at everything. Let the idiot moon after her.

* * *

><p>D-District Prison<p>

Galbadia

3 Years Ago

He smiles as they beat him.

His bottom lip is a swollen-fat slug of a thing that drips blood burning down his chin, and above him actinic sunglow smears itself shining across the ceiling-

The boot that arcs up off the floor to split his chin open around its heel knocks him reeling back, and the sun is gone now.

It's never coming back, for all he knows.

He keeps his mouth locked open around that fucking grin anyway, because it's the only thing he has left. They can waterboard him, kick the shit out of him, string him up on that wall he can still sort of see Pubes sagging from, if he squints hard enough- but they are not going to take away his mother_fucking _will. They will never know how close they are to breaking it, because he's not going to give them the goddamned satisfaction.

They never unshackle him- they only look fucking stupid- but he does his best to give as good as he gets anyway.

He lands a kidney punch that slams one of them moaning against the wall and the chain between his wrists makes a nifty little fucking garrote he slips jangling around another-

And they zap him with something that's either a stun baton or some of that advanced class magic Garden wouldn't let them fuck with for the first several years of their training and it _hurts_, it hurts like a motherfucking _bitch _and he is on his knees retching when the next kick smashes stars pirouetting across his eyes, one of those temple shots that feels like you bought rounds for the whole goddamned bar and decided to finish them off yourself-

They might be doing this to his mother.

They might be doing this to his mother right now, and he scrapes himself bleeding from the floor to kill them-

His hands are scab-peeling lumps of fist that are about as twisted as his fucking conscience after a good stomping from the guards.

He spits blood in an arc that pegs one of them in the eye and extends them shaking out in front of him, shackles jingling.

Come and get it motherfuc-

There's an armor-plated knee in his stomach that curls him around it like he's reaching out for a hug and it feels like the fucker _ruptured _something because trying to breathe is like sticking a goddamned lighter in his mouth and thumbing the striker and now he folds gagging face first onto the floor-

They leave him there when they are done.

He stays huddled up like that for a very long time- maybe days. He's never figured out time in this fucking place anyway. Maybe he's been here for years; maybe the entire world has moved on without Seifer Almasy and he's just a graying old man reliving old glory and fairytales in this lightless fucking hole.

He thinks about Time Compression a lot in this little shadow-smeared square of a box. It's the gray walls, he's pretty sure; sometimes through blood-dripping blinks that flick droplets of red smog across his eyes the walls begin to melt, running together like paint-

And all of a sudden he's not sure where he is anymore.

Everything tends to look the same through half-open eyes, and it all tastes like defeat to him anyway; who's to say he ever got out of that monochrome landscape with the shadows off in the distance that might have been other people wandering around but were probably just his mind going off the fucking rails?

They come to peel him off the floor some unknown measurement of time later. He has to piss like a racehorse and he's hungry, but he hasn't pissed himself yet and he's not starving, so it can't have been too long since they left him in this broken little heap at the foot of his bed.

They clean him up, which means maybe someone is coming to see him, maybe someone has had a change of heart about traitor lapdog Seifer Almasy- maybe it's his _mother_, free at last and here to take him back to that seaside cottage where they used to be happy-

He doesn't make a sound when they set his bones and clumsily Cure him, and he does not even so much as moan when they slop disinfectant sizzling across his wounds-

And then the door opens and he is standing and he cannot hold everything back anymore because he's been bottling it up for too fucking long already, because he wanted his _mother_, his real mother, and into his cell steps Quistis Trepe in her meticulous fucking boots with her perfect fucking hair and her perfect unmarred fucking face and he is so goddamned _disappointed_ he could put his fist through the wall.

He sits smiling on his bed with his hands folded stiffly between his knees and looks her casually up and down, like she is an unexpected guest in his house.

He is not going to let her see how very fucking bent and broken he is. "Hello, Instructor. Nice to see you. Conjugal visit?"

She wrinkles up her nose just like he thought she would. It is oddly comforting, this predictability. "Just an ordinary one."

"I'm flattered; I knew you couldn't stay away from your favorite student for long. It's just not the same with me gone, is it?" He can't quite smooth the rough edges from his voice, but his egotistical scorn is still thick enough to cover them. It's not like she gives enough of a shit to look past it anyway.

There is a long slow slide of a step forward, and then she stops again, then she is staring blinking down at his face from behind these glasses that fracture sun-scatter back across his eyes-

And she is not saying. One. Goddamn. _Word_.

He is not sure what he's waiting for; she is not here to forgive him.

She might be here to kill him, this student of hers who went so very very wrong; she might be here to wrap her hands fumbling around his neck and maybe he will let her, maybe he will sit quietly here on this bed watching flyspecks of red semi-conscious become galactic smears of black eternity that send him spinning from this life into the next-

Fuck it. He doesn't owe her a goddamned thing- she _forgot _him. _She forgot him_. They grew up together on a beach with a mother who loved them, and he used to help her build sandcastles on a wave-eaten shore when he wasn't busy knocking them over- he _kissed her skinned fucking knee _once for Hyne's goddamned sake, and years later when they might have been something more than a clumsy groping boy and girl kissing in the dark, she couldn't be bothered to even remember his fucking name.

Fuck _her_. If she comes at him across this bed, there is going to be one final casualty of the war. Maybe they will kill him when they return to find her bleeding at his feet, but he's going to die with his teeth in her throat and her blood in his mouth and he's going to fucking _revel _in it- bossy blue-eyed fucking Quisty's going to remember him for the rest of her motherfucking life-

He is starting to lose his grip on this smirk he keeps plastered across his lips, and between his knees his hands give a twitch that clinks his shackles chiming up against one another.

They sound like bells. When's the last time he heard bells?

When's the last time he's heard anything that's not dull meat-thud impacts that smash him coughing to his knees with some Galbadian asshole's boot in his gut and another on his fucking hand, grinding all the bones together until his world is one eternal thermite blaze that folds him retching down onto his face, praying for death?

That's the only thing he ever hears in this cell, except the silence.

Funny thing is, even silence has a noise if you listen to it long enough.

"Cid asked me to come," she tells him, folding both hands awkwardly in front of her.

Fucking of course. She wouldn't have the balls to look her greatest fuck-up in the face unless it was one of those orders she was so fond of following. If Garden had told her to let him get in one final balls-to-the-hilt ass-to-the-wall fuck with her tits in his hands, she'd probably slip her panties right off underneath that stupid little skirt without so much as goddamned blinking.

Yeah, she'd do it. Might throw up all over her pretty little shoes afterward, but she'd do it.

He hates her. Or, more accurately: he wants to hate her. She is a product of everything he despises, buffed and pinned and unwrinkled and so goddamned put together it brings stomach acid churning up across his tongue, and for just one eyeblink of a moment he wishes she were here to fuck him after all- he wants to bend her screaming across his bed and screw her until they're both bruised and bleeding and holding on to each other just because there's nothing else to grasp-

That's his mother talking again, or Ultimecia- whoever the bitch really was in the end.

They are all jumbled up together in his head.

"B. Garden is negotiating your release." She says this like he's supposed to give a shit, like it's supposed to bring him smiling to his feet or throw him groveling to his knees-

And he's standing after all now with his shackles jingling between his hands and he is hunched sweating over injuries that do not have time to heal before they are broken open all over again, but he still towers her, and there is a subtle involuntary flinch on her face that warms his goddamned heart.

She wants to not be afraid of him- he can see it in her face, but she is weaponless and alone and after all he is one stone cold batshit asshole with a right hook that could dent plate armor, and they haven't even let her keep any spells stocked.

Prison policy.

He leans just slightly into her, close enough for her to feel his breath on her face. "You don't have to stand all the way across the room, Instructor. There's plenty of room on the bed for two." He lets the innuendo in his voice leak out into his smile.

She has both arms across her chest now, and his banter has put her back into that classroom where he was just a noisy interruption in the final row and not a dangerous megalomaniac bent on forcing the world to bow cringing at his feet, or die standing. He can see it in her eyes- she is Instructor Trepe reining in a student now, and for a moment the smile on his lips and in his eyes is genuine, because he's a little fucking tired of being the guy who tried to take over the world and fucked everything all to hell.

He is a little fucking _sick _of brands like 'lapdog' and 'traitor' and all his hate smokes wisping away because she is not calling him either of these, all the nuclear rage powering his heart is blinking out and sagging him weak-kneed back down onto his bed where she can't see his legs shaking-

They did a real fucking number on him today. He feels like a truck hit him.

"Cid requested that you and Edea both be treated as political prisoners in accordance with Treaty 5398, which explicitly prohibits the use of torture-"

His laughter is so loud it bounces rolling off the walls, and drowns her protests.

"Seifer." There is a frown on her lips and around her eyes, little crinkled webs of age lines that crease the skin beneath her glasses. "I can file a formal complaint-"

He is still laughing when he cuts her off. "You do that, Instructor. They'll just kill me. It shuts you up, and it saves the cost of a public execution. Gonna' disappoint a lot of people, though."

The frown is the only little crack in the poise of her flawless façade. "You have bruises all over your face."

His shrug is a casual spread of his hands, as far apart as he can get them. "Squall used to do worse."

"You're moving strangely. Broken ribs?"

His answer is another shrug that hurts everything it reaches, muscles he already knows about and some he is just now discovering.

She is very pretty against the backdrop of this ugly stinking fucking cell, and for just a moment he wants to tell her: _"Remember when we were kids and sometimes you liked me?"_

He can't say anything, right now.

He wants to scream 'get me _out _of here, Trepe.' He wants to hurl himself sobbing at her feet getting snot and tears and little strings of blood-tinged fucking drool all over her shiny goddamned boots-

He wants to fucking _go home_.

He wants her to save his mother- he wants her to remember him for just _one damn moment, that's all he's fucking asking_-

He wants this woman with her stiff-starched uniform and her tidily-clipped fishtail of a hairdo, this woman who is always so goddamned put together she could give a fucking file cabinet inadequacy issues-

He just wants her to hold him and tell him everything is going to be all right. She's got all the answers after all, right?

This all hits him like a hammer blow, leaving him reeling beneath it. He does not let any of this show on his face, but he can feel his smirk begin to falter around the edges, and he brings one hand up to rub his scar before she can notice.

"Is Matron getting out?" He has to cough the pleading from his voice.

There is just enough hesitation to make him want to throw up. As long as his mother is safe, he can rot in this cell for the rest of his life for all he cares, and they can beat him, electrocute him, throw him down and ass rape him for all the shit he gives-

He just wants to know she is safe, you know?

Peel away all the twisted fairytale ambitions and power trips and bullying inner core that is Seifer Almasy, and what he really wants when you dig down through all the other shit, what he is really hoping will find him one day-

Is a family that loves him.

This is what Matron used to represent. And he knows she is still in there somewhere, he knows if she can just hang on he can get to her, he can _save _her even if the only thing he's ever really been good at is breaking shit and starting fights- _he can be better_ than that, just for her, get it?

He's sorry he wasn't good enough to love before. He's sorry she didn't like him enough to not give him up, and he is fucking _sorry _he was not important enough to make her fight the bitch wearing her skin like a goddamned suit-

He wanted to save her. He wanted her to save _him._

He still wants to save her.

He still _loves _her, when all is said and done. She is always going to be his Matron slipping him cookies from the oven, and he is always going to be a smiling blonde-haired boy on a beach, holding her hand.

There is a whole fucking third degree burn layer of scar tissue between them now, and he's not sure how to scrape it flaking onto the ground beneath their feet. But he can figure it out, if it means he can still have her- he can do _something _with it, if it means she will let him be her favorite again-

"Cid is…negotiating Edea's release as well."

There is something in her voice that brings his head slowly down in fractional start and stop bursts that peel his eyes blinking from the ceiling. "They're not letting her out." He is not asking a question.

"The situation is…complicated, Seifer. No one wants to believe she was possessed- as far as the public is concerned, Edea Kramer _is _the sorceress, not Ultimecia. It's a lot easier to swallow than a sorceress from the future controlling someone who had absolutely no choice in the matter. It is less frightening for them to believe that- if they accept that Edea was not in control of herself, then they have to accept that it could have happened to anyone, to one of them, to their children-"

He cuts her off with a slash of one hand that echoes clanging off the walls. "What are they going to do with me?"

She pokes her glasses with a finger that looks like it is shaking, just slightly. "Galbadia is willing to accept that you were under the sorceress' power and were not in control of yourself from the time you kidnapped Deling throughout the rest of the war."

"Deling came before Ultimecia showed up."

"I would not mention that to them."

It is not her fault but he is glaring at her anyway, because he is not sure what else to do, because he is not sure what else he _can _do-

"So they're going to let me go and execute her? They think _I'm _just fucking fine but _she's _a danger?" His voice gathers thunder as he keeps going. "Are you _fucking _kidding me?"

He is on his feet without remembering how and when he got there.

Somehow she has closed the distance between them and she is reaching tentatively for his arm and it is almost in her hand, it is almost cradled in her fucking fingers before he understands what is happening, and he snatches it scowling away because he doesn't _want _her goddamned pity- he doesn't want _any _goddamned _pity _and if she-

If she so much as _touches _him-

He turns his back to her.

Something is stuck in his throat that tastes like old meat; it's his voice or his tongue or a slab off his gnawed-up cheek, but whatever it is it's _choking _him, and there is a knot of dread like a fist balled up around his throat, not letting go-

He wants her _out_.

He wants her out _now _because there is something cataclysmic stretching tentative streamers of pseudopodia that extend burning up from his stomach into his chest-

There is something fucking _brewing _in him, and now he is watching little ghost-flickers of Seifers carry out all the fury chewing its way through him, shadows that punch walls and overturn his bed and bring both fists jangling up toward Instructor Trepe's pretty little throat and he is going to kill her if she doesn't get the _fuck _away from him-

He is going to kill something if this stranglehold on his throat does not let up, and she is the first thing within his reach. And you know, she never gave enough of a shit to remember him, so why should he give two flying _fucks _if one expert wrench of his hands sags her flopping down into his arms, shattered tongues of C5 vertebrae poking out through that pretty blonde-fuzzed nape-

His voice is a restrained tremor. "Get out."

She leaves very quietly.

* * *

><p>Centra<p>

Present Day

His boots sift lazily-discarded cigarette packs and food-smeared napkins that wipe unidentified detritus streaking across his boots, and he fists both hands in his pockets with a sneer.

He doesn't even know what he's doing out here. He's got a warm naked body asleep in a bed waiting for him, and maybe he's not a big fan of sleep anymore, maybe he is not particularly enamored of stepping off into that abyss that's supposed to bring restoration but just comes bearing nightmares, for people like him-

But curling up next to that warm naked body just to watch her sleep is a hell of a lot more appealing than this.

It's cold and he's forgotten his goddamned coat; he keeps his shoulders hunched against the rain-damp air that presses down like a hand around him, and prods the alleyway with a toe that stirs litter up around him in skeletal leaf-slithers that remind him of her voice.

There will always be something that reminds him of her voice.

He leans a shoulder up against precipitation-oiled brick and his eyes find the sky above his head, a blank black void that brings him shaking back to nights that sound thunderclaps of artillery whistling down around him-

All of the nights in Esthar look like this: featureless onyx as far as he can fucking see, because the city is a powered-down wreck around him, and even the stars cannot bear to show their little goddamned faces.

He hates the dark.

He figured this out a long time ago, somewhere between grunting beneath his mother and watching Quistis Trepe die in his arms in that black-shadowed not-quite-day he knows he will see every day for the rest of his fucking life; he doesn't quite need a nightlight, not yet, but maybe if he was less of a chest-puffed asshole, he might. Just a little something to keep all those things slithering in the shadows at bay, until he shuts his eyes at least.

He doesn't tell anyone else this, of course. Not even Trepe- it's the price he pays for building himself up so goddamned far the inevitable fall's going to hurt like a bitch. He's already done it once, after all, and once is more than enough for him. Enough time has passed that he is Seifer Almasy of the Disciplinarian Committee again, feared and obeyed and- by a few minor factions- adulated in the way only chest-thumping pre-pubescents can manage. He sees them gather whispering in halogen-lit corners to watch him practice; Seifer Almasy the lapdog is just a distant little whisper of a memory, now.

For everyone except him, of course.

He shifts his shoulder against the bricks that dig grooves into his muscles, and crosses both arms over his chest.

There is nothing in this alley but crumples of blood-smudged trash that twine like hands around his feet, but he is not really here for Ellone anyway. This is just what he tells himself.

Lot of blood for a bitten tongue, though. Big fucking mess too- it's either an extraordinarily ill-maintained section of street corner in an otherwise tidy little town, or she put up one hell of a struggle fighting off whatever the fuck was going on in her head. Neither fact matters much though, because he is not going to understand things she cannot even remember herself, and nothing he can say or do or theorize is going to clear the frown that has not left Wuss' brow since they found her. His face is one of Trepe's goddamned projector screens, a vacant slate that shows every v of crow's feet and squiggle of concerned wrinkle line and spring-coil of tension clear as fucking day. There is nothing calculating about Zell Dincht- he couldn't bluff his way out of a prison rape scene if his asshole was at risk.

It is one of the things Seifer will almost not quite admit to liking about him; he's had enough mind-fuckery to last him his whole life, thanks.

But he didn't come out here to think about Zell or Ellone or even Quistis- what he needs is a little goddamned _air_, even if the shit out here is fucking cold and he is still not quite sure why he is too fucking stupid to not stay inside fondling his girlfriend's tits until neither one of them has anything left but exhausted, sated sleep.

It's that goddamned chest at the foot of their bed, the one he can still see even now with his eyes flickering around this breeze-swirled alleyway like it's got something to tell him. Innocuous enough with the lights on- glass-polished mahogany that shows him Quistis' profile and the ragged edges of his own scar as he leans in to kiss her, little gold-gleaming padlock shaped like an are-you-Hyne-fucking-serious heart-

That's what drives him out here.

Fucking thing looks like a gravestone, in the dark.

He's seen enough gravestones to last him a lifetime, and even more that are not so much gravestones as hastily-erected monuments to fallen soldiers that cant crazily leaning to one side, because the fucker pounding it down into Esthar's soil is too busy sobbing over his friend's body.

They remind him of those twin humps of freshly-tilled earth in a shitty weed-choked backyard that might have been a nice little goddamned place one day, if Fuijin had lived to finish it.

But she didn't, and he can't bring either one of them back anyway, because wishes are like assholes after all- everyone's got 'em and all they ever really amount to is a whole lot of stinking shit.

Revenge is not a wish. It's something that's so fucking tangible in his heart he can taste it in his throat, and when he catches up with the fucker who brought this entire shitstorm crashing down onto their heads, Derran Daar is going to make a bunch of those little shit-useless wishes that are never going to help him, that are going to leave him curled sobbing around Seifer's steel-toed boot spitting blood and teeth and all the shattered little pieces of the elusive fucking hope that is a failing of POW's everywhere.

It is why Devan Riker died with a smile on his throat instead of on a battlefield directing troops, and a day or week or month from now, Galbadia will lose another general at the hands of Seifer Almasy, SeeD assassin extraordinaire.

Information is never free, after all. Squall Leonhart has more shit in the air than he can juggle- deploying squads, overseeing training, keeping his precious little son secret from a world that will tear him to pieces, if it ever comes to light that some demon spawn of a sorceress' offspring is kicking around in the world. Attempting to open peace negotiations between nations, which of course they all know is a fucking joke; Quistis thinks Leonhart's just tired of it all and ready to be a father to his son- he's got daddy issues a mile wide, after all.

Seifer thinks Trepe's being too generous.

Squall's going soft behind that desk.

And maybe there are some days his greatest desire is to die with his teeth in Squall Leonhart's throat- but it is never quite enough to make him forget his posse and what he owes them, and that Pubes has the resources and the power to dig up that asshole's hiding place. All he needs to do is carry out a few hits that eliminate a prominent general here, a successful lieutenant there.

You suck my dick, I'll suck yours.

Quistis does not know about any of this, of course.

He wants to see her face if she ever finds out, though.

From a safe distance, of course. Be a little slap-in-the-face reminder for her that Squall might be putting on some kind of mask or façade or whatever shit he's got going on that convinces her he's not such a rotten diseased asshole after all, but he's still willing to risk someone his friends care about as a means to an end.

As long as he's just risking Seifer Almasy, of course. He doesn't see Pubes foaming at the mouth one-hand-down-his-pants eager to send Quistis in there alone without back-up.

He is probably hoping that Seifer will not duck or counter or turn fast enough one day, and he can coax a comfort fuck out of Quistis when all is said and done and he's another memorial on a field.

Pubes better make sure he's real fuckin' dead, first.

His knuckles creak little pops of firecracker echo that shift his bones grinding up against one another, and underneath his skin old fractures spit fire. He's used to shit hurting and breaking down and stiffening up by now, though; SeeDs have an early expiration date, after all: fade into ambiguity behind a desk, or die. Kind of a shitty retirement package, you ask him.

Vibrations from his pocket send waves pulsing down his leg, and it takes him a moment to realize his phone is ringing.

* * *

><p>It took him an eternity to make the call.<p>

He was not sure why, beyond the fact that speaking directly to Seifer Almasy was an ulcer-in-the-making he'd rather avoid under any but the most dire of circumstances.

And perhaps the fact that Quistis was going to kill him when Galbadia shipped Seifer back in pieces just large enough to doggy-bag.

He was still staring at the e-mail open on his laptop monitor when his hand made its final lap across the palm-sized phone on the tabletop beside him, and closed decisively around it at last.

* * *

><p>The voice on the other end sets his teeth on edge hard enough to creak his entire jaw.<p>

Forget if looks could kill: he'd rather reach through the fucking phone and do it himself. "Pubes; what a pleasant surprise. To what do I owe the pleasure of interrupting getting my dick sucked to fuck myself in the ear with the AIDS-infected knife that is your voice?" He tells the lie without blinking.

There is a brief pause on the other end of the line. The asshole's not letting himself get baited.

"I found Derran." Pubes' voice is Trabian cold, but then again, when is it not? "He's not with the Galbadians after all; or, at least, not working with them. He's being transferred to D-District tomorrow on the first train out of Timber. 0600 hours."

He sees Raijin's grave, and Fujin's, and something hot and slippery and predatory ignites in his chest and sticks in his throat and he is _so close_- he can see the cringing fuck's face in his mind, he can roll his fear reeking around his _mouth_- he is going to have his teeth in this fucker's _throat _before the day is out _tomorrow_-

"Seifer, he's going to be heavily guarded-"

He clicks his phone shut.

There is a brief back-of-the-mind nudge that sounds like Quistis' voice, that is her eyes and lips and hands to come home to, but here's the truth about that little ugly seed his mother helped nurture: love is all fine and good and worth dying for and all that shit, but what really smokes his blood, what _really _fires all the nerve endings in his body like he's a human fucking torch fresh from the inferno-

Is shattering bone and ruining cartilage and letting Hyperion get a good long drink of some asshole who's really fucking _pissed _him off.

He shuts off his phone and steps from the alleyway with both hands in his pockets, and the moon in the sky above him bleeds a long thin shadow-Seifer across the ground in front of him.

* * *

><p>She is beautiful when she sleeps.<p>

She is always beautiful, but when she sleeps, she is not Quistis Trepe the warrior, Quistis Trepe the instructor with her hands at her back and her hair neatly pinned, Quistis Trepe with the cold-steel eyes killing sobbing children of first years because they're fucking goners anyway and it's that or let them suffer-

She is a woman who used to be a blue-eyed girl on a beach, chasing him down the sand.

The frightening thing is, when he stands here like this watching her chest rise and fall in metrically precise inhalations that scatter hair loosely across her cheek, he is suddenly knocked fucking reeling by the fact that he would give up everything he is and was and could be for this woman, and all she has to do is fucking _ask_.

And the ironic goddamned thing is, she doesn't even understand this hold she's got over him.

He crouches next to her as he knocks the keys from the dresser beside the bed quietly jingling into his hand, and his free hand comes up to brush her cheek. His caress is a long slow flick across the damaged tissue on her cheek, this ragged little circle she can barely even stand to look at, and he bends down to kiss it because _fuck _it, it's part of her and he doesn't care, she's still beautiful and he wishes she wasn't too goddamned fucking stupid to not see that.

He might not come home tomorrow.

There is always a chance he might not come home.

But, y'know, that's not the hard thing, it's not the _worst _thing- better him not come home than her, and at least he is leaving while she still loves him and everything is not all fucked up and he can die knowing somewhere out there Quistis Trepe is safe and alive and maybe even happy.

She can be happy without him. He's the one who is so fucking tangled up in her it scares the shit out of him.

She blinks her eyes sleepily up at him. "Seifer? Is something wrong?"

He slides the keys deftly into his pocket, and leans in to kiss her forehead. "Just went for a walk. Go back to sleep, Instructor."

She tries to prop herself on an elbow, and he nudges her back down. "Nightmares again?" she murmurs drowsily. Her reassuring smile is a slow lazy coil of a thing, and he kisses it until they are both breathless and she has all ten fingers curled into the collar of his shirt, pressing him up against her.

She is still naked. He pushes her back down with all the willpower that bitch never let him use, and the hand that slides shaking from his pocket curves up and over the stretch of mattress between them to graze lightly up her ribcage around to her breasts.

He sends a jolt of Sleep down through her chest that flops her limply back against the bed, and for just a moment he kneels there staring down at her with one hand combing hair from her cheek, and he leans over to press his forehead up against hers for three long slow breaths. One, two, three, asshole, peel yourself the fuck away and get going.

He's going to need the head start when she wakes up.


	9. Interlude Four

**A/N: All spelling errors are Zell's and not my own. ;)**

_Dear Selphie,_

_So uh this is Zell. I found these leters under Irvine's bed and man it looks like he's been doing this for a long time huh? I mean, I know I probly shouldn't have gotten into them but I was just kinda poking around his room just to see what all was in there and I defanitely wasn't looking for any porn, and I found these and I sat down and I read through all of them and it makes me start missing you all over again, Selphie. And I thought maybe I'd just start slipping in a couple of my own, you know? I mean, he'll probly never find them, so it's ok, just stuff between you and me and I just wanted you to know that we all love you and we miss you and we wish you were still here with us._

_Rumember that one time you snuck into the cafeteria with me after curfew and we took all those hot dogs and Squall almost crapped his pants because that crazy lunch lady with the mole went into his office and freaked out for like three hours about how she was robbed? And the time we wrapped Squall's whole desk in toilet paper and took all those pictures of Irvine posing naked with just the toilet paper wrapped around his man parts and stuff and hung the pictures all over his office? _

_Man, I miss doing that sort of stuff. It's not the same without you, you know? I mean, part of the gang is just _gone _and I stopped junctioning GFs a long time ago because I wanted to rumember the way we all grew up together, and I rumember this little green-eyed girl who was always happy and smiling and that was _you_, Selph- that was you and you were always really good at making other people happy too._

_Especially Kinneas. He's not the same without you. I miss the old him. He just doesn't smile that much anymore. He got hurt bad a while back and I thought maybe we were gonna lose him too and I sat there like all night with him, praying and stuff, and I don't even believe in that kinda' thing. I just was so desprite not to have to let go of someone else, you know? _

_I wish I could still talk to you and stuff because you were always good at the girl stuff and Quisty's not and Seifer's just a big stupid prick sometimes, and even your boyfriend just laughs at me because I'm being a pussy. The thing is I'm in love with Ellone, like really in love with her Selph and I don't know what to do because why would she feel the same way about me? So I just kinda sit around telling myself today's gonna be the day I'm gonna do it I'm gonna tell her and then I never do because I don't even know how to say it. But you'd know what to do and how to get her to feel the same way about me, huh? You'd just like sit us down and that would be that and then somehow you'd figure out something that would make everyone happy. _

_Sometimes I'm afraid to tell her because then it's like I'm making it real, and when it's real people get hurt. People like us don't live long lives. I was always ok with that before, because it was what my grandpa did, you know? And I'd want him to be proud of me, and I want to be the guy who saves people and stuff because that's what the good guys do, and my grandpa was one of the good guys. That's who I want to be. But the other day I was thinking about it, and I reelized I'd give it all up for Ellone, if she wanted me to. I've worked pretty much my whole life toward being a SeeD and being this big tough hero that everyone looks up to, but like all she has to do is smile at me, you know? And then I just want to tell her let's go off and live in a house by the sea like Cid and Matron used to and let's be happy and let's go fishing and stuff and have Quisty and Seifer and Irvine and Squall over for barbecues and just _normal _stuff, you know? Just the stuff we never get to do. _

_I've never told anyone else this because they'll probly just laugh and it's stupid anyway, but it's ok telling you. I wanna have a family and stuff one day, like kids and everything. We go out to visit the orphanage a lot. Cid's got some new kids there now, and I like playing with them and I think about how it would be nice to be a dad one day, and I know I'm probly never going to get to do that. Did you want kids with Irvine? I always thought you guys would get married. I would have liked that. _

_There's a lot of shit going down here, but don't worry, cuz I'm gonna keep him and everyone else safe. They're gonna have to go through me if they want at our friends, Selphie, and nothing gets through these iron fists, man! Booyaka, right? _

_Love you Selphie. Miss you. _

_Love,_

_Zell_


	10. Chapter Five

**A/N: First of all, I apologize for taking so long to upload this. I've been writing a lot, but have not really had time to edit and post in addition to actually writing this. (Usually my editing/posting is done on weekends or later on weekdays, but my weekends have been pretty busy lately, and weekdays have all been spent typing furiously pretty much right up until bedtime.) I'm blathering on about all this simply because I want you guys to know I am still steadily working on this-I actually have about five or six chapters stockpiled, and just as many interludes, I've just been a little lax (translation: busy, and in all honesty, lazy) in actually posting them.**

**Thank you thank you thank you as always to all my reviewers; I sincerely appreciate your comments and love to hear from you guys. If anyone is interested, I posted a new one-shot a couple of days ago that follows Seifer after he is spit out of Time Compression. I think this is my first FF VIII one-shot in about twenty million years. It is not heavily S/Q, but does definitely contain hints of it, so check it out if you haven't already. (SHAMELESS SELF-PROMOTION ALERT.)**

**Also, things are about to get nasty in this story. (Not that you guys probably didn't expect that.) Just know that from here on out, the shit is just going to keep continuously splattering the fan throughout the next several chapters. You've been warned.**

**Chapter Five**

Train Station

Timber

The sky above him is a bright rose-steel smear of dawn.

It's trying to rain, through gaps between storm clouds that show him slivers of sun.

He has no weapon or coat or even the faintest preliminary outline of a plan- he is Seifer Almasy and he doesn't _need _a fucking plan- and morning-chilled breeze traces shivering figure eights up his spine and out over his shoulders.

He watches them load Daar onto the first train of the morning, and pushes himself out of his crouch into a predatory slink of a walk that is so silent they do not hear him walk right up behind them.

Daar is already on the train, but that's all right; his escorts leave a guard behind to watch the platform, and a knife hand to the back of the neck drops the guy like a rock into a shining armor-dented puddle at Seifer's feet.

Funny coincidence: they are about the same size.

He smiles as he yanks the helmet free from matted gray-black hair, and begins to strip the rest of the body.

* * *

><p>She dreams in fractured pieces.<p>

The first splinter is something she is vaguely certain is her reality: a rat's nest snarl of nausea in her gut and the whispering silk-slide of sheets across bare skin, and something that coalesces into hazy jigsaw fragments around her- curtain-filtered sunlight and mirror-polished mahogany she thinks might be a hotel-

She _knows_ is a hotel, and if she lifts her head just slightly, if she tilts it throbbing to one side-

She can blink a half-open bathroom door into focus, and the garish lemon wedge of illumination staining the carpet just beyond it.

The second is less certain. The second is a kalaidescope whirl of red-painted lips coughing up clots of gore onto her face and scar-roughened fingers that brush trembling across her cheek, and there is a voice choked up with tears that wants her to tell it she is ok-

There is a boy with a stick sword and a handful of sand-

There is a man with a scar and a scowl waiting for her to love him when she is not even sure she loves herself-

The hotel shifts and disintegrates and slides out from underneath her-

_-I want out I want out I want _out _someone please help me squall are you there someone help me I need help ok someone get me out of here-_

"Hello?" Her voice is an unoiled hinge-creak, pillow-muffled. "Is someone there?"

* * *

><p>"I think someone heard me!"<p>

_-good rinoa good we knew you could do it try again ok keep trying until you're sure someone can hear you keep trying until they _can't _ignore you-_

"It hurts."

_-shh rinoa you'll be fine rinoa just keep trying it will only hurt for a little while it's worth it isn't it do you want to stay here forever he wants to keep you here forever you know-_

"What if it doesn't matter if they can hear me? What if they ignore me?"

_-it always matters rinoa that's all we want isn't it is for someone to listen to us that's all _you _want is just to get them to listen to you and even if you can only find one who will do it someone heard you rinoa didn't you feel that they're _listening _they're listening even when they don't want to look what you can do-_

"Hello?"

* * *

><p>"Hello?"<p>

She can hardly feel her heart through the thundering of blood in her ears and the tidal roar of nausea in her belly, but the voice in her head is full and rich and vibrating and it scratches talon flickers of lacerations burning through her mind-

She winds handfuls of sheet into her palms, and calls out for Seifer.

She does not understand what is happening. She is _frightened _and where _is _he doesn't he understand that she needs him-

His name is a feeble croak on her lips that stalls mid-vowel, because she remembers something even worse.

A whip crack of pain that sears everything screaming from her mind and it is coming from _his _hand, sizzling down fingertips that just stroked and caressed and cupped her cheek like she is something infinitely precious-

_-hello can you hear me hello _hello _I need help please help me squall hurt me he hurt me and I'm all alone will you help me-_

She leans her head over the side of the bed to vomit.

* * *

><p>Ellone's head snapped through a short vicious arc that cracked him loudly underneath the chin, and Zell jerked awake with a startled "Hunh?"<p>

"Please please please please please stop stop I can't take it it _hurts _please _stop_-"

He sat up with her head cradled against his chest and chafed sleep from his eyes, squinting into the dim morning-lit room to make out the top of her head. "Ellone? You ok?"

She pulled away with tears in her eyes and both hands over her ears, and inside his chest something rolled over and died and holy shit holy _shit _she was _bleeding_, where the hell was it all _coming _from-

"Ellone!" He wrestled her tear-streaked face into his hands as she twisted it sobbing out away from him, and against his chest her hands slid closed into bleached-white fists that clenched spastically around handfuls of shirt front.

"It _hurts_! Please make it stop! Please please please please-"

"Ok, ok, ok- Ellone, look at me? Look at me, please?" He smudged blood from underneath her nose with his thumb and wiped it carelessly across his pillow and Hyne fuck him _Hyne _someone please _help _him-

She wouldn't stop bleeding. He brought her upright out of the bed with both hands on her arms and half-carried her into the bathroom, where he promptly demolished nearly an entire roll of toilet paper trying to blot blood from her nose and her mouth and he was shaking so damn hard he kept dropping it, he kept fumbling these wads he pressed trembling to her face like a first-year cadet trying to keep hold of his weapon and his dignity halfway through a T-Rexaur attack, and he _didn't know what to do_.

"It hurts!" Ellone sobbed, sliding into a fetal-huddled pile at his feet.

"What hurts? Ellone, come on, _please_, look at me. Ellone? Can you hear me? I'm right here, ok? I'm not leaving. Just tell me what I need to do-"

"I don't know- I _don't know_- just please make it _stop_-"

"Ok, ok. Shh." He slid his hands gently underneath her arms and pulled her back into sitting position, leaning her spine up against the cupboards under the sink and crouching in front of her. He kept her hands tightly inside of his, stroking both thumbs down her wrists. "Calm down. Shh. It's gonna' be ok, I promise."

"No-" She shook her head. "No, it _hurts_ something's wrong- I keep seeing-"

He turned her right hand over and kissed the wrist, then pressed it to his cheek and twisted his face far enough around to brush her fingertips with his lips, keeping them there as her breathing slowly began to even out into rhythmic sob-broken gasps. He slid his left hand free of hers to tuck hair behind her ear, and brushed tears from her cheek with one agile flick of his wrist. "What'd ya' see? Was it like yesterday?"

She sniffled and let her head fall thudding back against the cupboard, wiping at both cheeks with her free hand. "No. No, it was worse. I don't understand. What's happening?"

Her eyes were so big and wet and _frightened_ he couldn't stand it, he needed to _do _something-

He kissed her forehead and the tip of her sun-freckled nose and one corner of her mouth, and she went utterly still and silent and breathless underneath him as he ran his fingertips across her lips, leaning his forehead up against hers. "I'm not gonna' let anything happen to you, ok? Ok, Ellone? I promise."

She closed her eyes.

He could feel his breath balled up in his throat like a fist and he'd probably regret it later, she'd probably push him away in horrified shock and then he'd feel like shit, then he'd need a good couple of hours in the gym working out all these unacceptable feelings he just couldn't help-

But with her eyes closed he could pretend, for just a moment, that she was waiting for him, that the slight part in her lips was invitation and not coincidence, and very softly and slowly and cautiously, he pressed his mouth up against hers.

She tasted like blood and salt and he didn't care, he didn't _care _because she had her hands tangled up in his hair and her lips open underneath his and now there was something inside his brain sputtering a long slow short-out of a death-

What was he thinking- what was he _doing_-

She was scared and not thinking clearly and he was taking _advantage _of her like some prick groping chicks on the train-

Ellone shook her head against his as he tried to pull away. "No, please. Zell, just…"

"Uh, sorry. Sorry- seriously, I didn't mean it."

Her eyes flickered open, close enough for him to see tiny diamondine flecks of green in them. "You didn't mean it?"

He could feel heat from his cheeks splash erratically down into his neck, and he brought one hand up through a loop to the back of his head, scratching it nervously. "I mean- I uh…sometimes friends kiss each other and stuff, right?"

She pressed her lips together and peeled one hand from his hair to tentatively sketch the lines of his tattoo with her fingertips, and he leaned unconsciously into her touch, shutting his eyes. There was a hint of a smile in her voice, underneath the nervous tremor of her fear. "You do this with all your friends?"

"Uh, well, like, not Seifer or Irvine or Squall- you know, any of the dudes-"

She let her head settle forward with a thump against his chest and he cut himself abruptly off, bringing his arms very carefully up to drape themselves in a knot of loose embrace around her shoulders. "Please," she whispered, "just don't leave me, ok? I just need you to stay here with me right now."

He rested his chin on the top of her head. "Yeah, sure. I'm not goin' anywhere- don't worry. I can stay here as long as you want me to, you know? I mean, until I have to pee or something, 'cause I'm uh…not really comfortable doing that in front of anyone- even the guys, and men's bathrooms are all about flashing penis in front of other guys. I mean, it's not like I'm afraid to pull it out or anything, it's just kinda' weird standing there peeing and realizing suddenly that some other guy's staring at your thing and you're sitting there wondering is it just my dong he's looking at, or is he turned on by pee or-"

Her laugh was a choked-off hiccup that gurgled wetly against his chest. It turned into a damp hack against the front of his shirt that hooked both shoulders abruptly up toward her ears, and suddenly there was that sound issuing from her again, that low keening moan that was not quite weeping, that was an incoherent jumble of pleas that scared the Hyne-loving shit out of him-

"Ellone?" Zell peeled her off his chest and held her gently at arms-length, giving her a little jostling shake that snapped her head limply back and forth. "_Ellone_?"

"_Please please please please please please please_-"

His heart jerked and stopped and turned over faultily in his chest, and he wiped strands of sweat-slick hair from her eyes, he brought his hand shivering up against her cheek-

"Ellone-"

"_Can anyone hear me? Can anyone hear me I'm all alone I'm all alone please someone _help _me I don't want to be alone anymore can you hear me_?"

He dropped his hands like she'd burned him.

It was a guttural gravel-scratch of a question that did not belong to her.

* * *

><p>She cannot stop vomiting- it is as though everything inside of her has broken loose and is coming back up and there is nothing she can do except hunch retching over the side of the bed waiting to die-<p>

It hurts that much.

She is not certain if it is the voice or the spell or the betrayal, but something inside of her is twisting like an acid-dipped knife, something is tearing shredding _smoldering_, and the entreaties are back, they have never left in the first place-

_-please are you still listening please please please are you still there-_

She draws the bed sheets around her like a cocoon, and begins to pray.

She has never believed in Hyne or deities or fate or providence, because a soldier deals in absolutes and not maybes or what-ifs or almosts- a soldier needs facts and not faith: strike here to break, cut here to kill-

It is all just instinctive human reaction, these prayers she slurs out one corner of her mouth to smear damply against the pillow beneath her cheek, and for a long time she lets them go on without even realizing she is speaking them.

Her stomach gives another seasick lurch, and around it her body spasms into a fetal contortion that brings her knees up toward her chest. A foggy sweat-blurred blink wipes the room from her eyes and the prayers from her lips, and suddenly she is dying on a battlefield all over again.

She still remembers everything about the moment: blood-crusted eyes and hands full of night-black sludge that tells her mechanically methodical mind she has taken damage to her internal organs, and the hazed-out face hovering anxiously far above her.

Lying on blood and rain-oiled pavement with her hands full of blood and her mind full of black-blooming stars of impending unconciousness, she had not recalled the man's name. It had not seemed important at the time- what was significant was the marionette jerk of his body and the 'o' of shock formed by his gut-speckled lips, and the hollow battle-muffled thud of his knees on the street beside her.

What was truly, world-ending imperative was that she had loved him and lost him and maybe she did not even know his name, but she was going to miss him.

She had closed her eyes, then.

She'd closed her eyes and let go her grasp on his sodden gasps and the scrape of his hand along her cheek, and she had let herself fall into a gray smog-shroud like the one she remembered wrapping itself around her like a dirty old coat after a castle and a witch and a heroic battle she was suddenly uncertain she had survived-

She had stayed there for a very long time. There was a boy with blonde hair and an emaciated tree limb of a sword off in the distance who did not come any closer, and faint wisps of ocean smell that reminded her of children whose hands did not boast faded strawberry stains of old blood.

She does this now. The smog-shroud is familiar and comforting and inside it are princesses and monsters and knights who are brave and handsome and immortal, who live on in her memory forever as they spin out from gilt-bound books between scabbed mother's hands. There are half-moons of dirt beneath the fingernails of these mother's hands, but they are well-trimmed and raw-scrubbed pink and they do not warp into talons that reach blindly out for the boy sitting mere inches away listening with his chin in his hands-

He was not the only one who always loved those old stories. She may forget this sometimes, between GF-chewed gaps in her mind that leave swirls of galactic black hole where there are supposed to be childhood recollections, but when it is important, when she has nothing else to cling to, she always remembers.

The heroes of stories are her only reason for getting up, some mornings.

She wants to be them. They are fast and strong and good enough, and they do not lose friends to random twists of fate. They do not lie awake at night waiting for the knight to come home, wondering when and if and how the monsters overwhelmed him at last.

_-hello can you still hear me hello is someone there please answer me please listen to me I need you to listen to me ok-_

She lets the stories rise spiraling up to drown the voice, and the smog-shroud closes itself gently all around her at last.

* * *

><p>He first got laid in the Secret Area, when he was fifteen. He stripped the girl as fast as his trembling, virginal hands could manage and had his dick inside her a flat three seconds later, foreplay having already been conducted in the manner of a little sweaty groping and some pelvic grinding that nearly made him come prematurely in his pants.<p>

Years later, he didn't even remember her name. Hell- if he was being honest, twenty minutes post-deed he probably didn't have a fucking clue. Maybe he never did.

What he mostly remembered was her size C tits in his hands and how disappointingly loose she'd been around him and how fast the whole fucking thing was over, and the secret little part of him that wished it had been glacial legs-up-to-fucking-here Quistis Trepe panting his name in his ear while he fucked all her composure moaning from those dick-sucking lips.

Teach her to fucking forget him.

Goddamned strange, the thoughts that passed through a man's mind as he hovered in the eternal slow-motion that is the tense just-fucking-wait-for-it moment between picturing a man's murder, and actually committing it.

The helmet he wore smelled like morning breath and fuck it his ass itched and hadn't the fuckwit he'd stolen the damn thing off ever maintained his armor? He screeched like a rusty door hinge with every step, which pretty much butt-fucked any chance at stealth.

Not that he really needed it, or had ever been particularly good at it. He'd always been more of the make-an-entrance type, anyway. Thing was, you saw what you expected to see, and the small contingency of soldiers escorting Esthar's former vice president expected to see a bored comrade making rounds with all the enthusiasm of a hybernation-disturbed Marlboro.

Got what you deserved.

Which is why he rewarded the blankly stupid acquiescence of the guard flanking the door to Derran Darr's private compartment with a sleeper's hold that wrapped his steel-clanking arms around the guy's neck tight enough to jerk him with a briefly shocked _hrrk! _off his feet, and crack his spine like a piece of kindling. Easy as splitting wood with a guillotine _clop _of axe head through sun-baked evergreen log, if you knew what you were doing.

Sounded almost the same, anyway.

He slid the door aside with one hand on the sword belted to his waist, and stepped inside. It wasn't Hyperion, but it punched through the neck of the soldier to Darr's left nicely enough, and carved up through a butterfly crescent that liver-stabbed the asshole on the right who made a too-late lunge for his gun.

Daar sat down hard in the seat he'd vacated with his hands splayed out before his face and his pants spreading a warm amonia-stinking stain all down the front, and the sight peeled Seifer's lips up off his teeth in a smile he felt all the way down to his toes.

Gave him the goddamned warm and fuzzies, looking into this flinching _shitheel's _face with the bewildered puppy eyes and the trembling lips and the cuffs jingling between his knees, little tinkling _clinks _like the droplets of blood landing on the steel-capped toe of his right boot.

He slipped his helmet off and let the fucker get a long slow look at his face, helmet-rubbed forehead scar and merciless green stare and teeth-tucked lip curl- might as well let the guy get a good goddamned eye full, because it was going to be the last thing he ever saw.

"Hello," he said conversationally, folding the helmet into the crook of his arm. "My name's Seifer. You might remember me from the Second Sorceress War- I was the jerkoff who helped that sorceress bitch blow a bunch of shit up and kill a lot of people." He fit as many teeth as he could into the grin he flashed this shivering pale-faced little coward, and he did not let it reach his eyes.

He set the helmet carefully aside on the floor, out of the way where he wouldn't trip on it should the need for a hasty exit make itself known.

He began to strip off his gloves, one finger at a time.

He was going skin to skin for this motherfucker: there were just times you needed to get your hands a little messy. Ah- who the fuck was he kidding? Took all the goddamned fun out of it if you _didn't _get a little blood on your hands.

He intended to have fun with this piece of shit for a very long time. Malcolm was one thing. This STD-infected asshole was entirely another- _no one _hurt his motherfucking Posse without answering for it.

His fingers came together in a twist that cracked all ten of them one after another- pop pop pop, firecracker echoes in the stale stagnant air that was starting to smell like blood and piss and if he wasn't mistaken, a little hint of shit tang.

He had a knife dangling from his utility belt, but he wasn't going to get to that for a while. Not quite personal enough, after what this goddamned shit-fucking piece of trash had taken from him.

His foot arced up in a front kick he chambered like he was being graded on form- knee up and all five toes curled back out of the way, and a thrust of his hips that put all trimly-muscled 180 pounds behind the strike he hammered into Daar's knee cap hard enough to break it with a sharp greenstick splinter that bent the man forward over it with a scream. Seifer grabbed him by the crumpled unwashed front of his suit and pulled him back upright in time to introduce his jaw to an uppercut he fired from the hip, and Daar began to cry.

Tch. He'd barely even started.

He tore a strip of cloth from the neck of the dress shirt underneath Daar's worse-for-the-wear suit and stuffed it into the man's mouth, slamming him facedown into the faded ass-worn velveteen of the seat beneath him. "Here's the fucking thing- you got two of my friends killed. Unfortunately for you, I don't know how long it took them to die, or how much it hurt, or if they begged the people who did it to spare the other one. They were married, and they were just starting their lives together; fucking tragedy, huh?" He punctuated his little speech with another kick that lifted the weeping man up off the seat he sprawled across and broke several of his ribs; Seifer heard them go with a little satisfied shiver down his spine that felt a lot like his mother's nails across his back.

"So here's the deal, you _fuck_- since I'm not sure how long or how bad they suffered, I haven't decided how long you're going to beg me to die. The only thing I know is that you're going to do it, and when I think you're ready, I'm going to take the gag out. If you scream for help, you're gonna' wish I ass-fucked you with this knife I have here, because what I'm going to do to you will be a lot worse. Got it?"

With his face smashed down into the seat like that, Seifer couldn't tell if the man nodded or not. He decided to take the gag-stifled whimper as affirmation, and landed several more bone-breaking blows before pulling the knife from his belt and opening it with a nimble wrist flick that flipped the blade out like a tongue.

Polished as a fucking mirror.

It was going to have a lot to reflect by the time he was done with it.

His first slice sloppily carved away a pinky finger that disappeared underneath one of the dead soldiers, leaving behind a ragged chewed-off stump of red-clotted bone that poked up accusingly at him. Daar shrilled a muted scream into his gag, and twisted underneath the knee Seifer jabbed into his back.

He liked where this was going. Maybe he'd cut off all ten fingers, move onto the toes from there…

What was it his mother had liked doing to him?

Oh, that was right.

He brought a little flickering red-orange globe glistening to life in the palm of his right hand, and rolled Daar onto his back with an effortless one-handed yank. Fira was a mid-level spell that hurt a whole hell of a lot but didn't inflict anywhere near the damage Firaga was capable of, but shove it down a guy's face like you're trying to choke him on the shit and it'll get his attention real fucking fast.

His mother had been an excellent healer; even using Firaga, even boiling all the skin off his jaw and crisping the bone underneath into a black-fused lump of half-melted skeleton, she'd always been able to fix it. Putting him back together was what she did best, after taking him apart.

Seifer, regrettably, was not nearly so adept at healing magic.

So when Daar's skin dripped in elastic string cheese strands off his face, Seifer did not know how to help him.

Not that he would have bothered anyway.

He could hear the shit's pig squeals all the way through that flap of dirty shirt collar. Teach him to turn traitor on the wrong fucking people, huh? You just never knew what kind of nuttier-than-a-shithouse-rat asshole was lurking in the shadows, caring about the people you fucked over.

He wrenched the gag roughly from between blood-stained lips. "Beg."

"_Please_-" It was a ragged deformed whimper of a thing, barely comprehensible. Understandable under the circumstances- hard to say much with half your tongue burned away and your jaw all charred to shit- but y'know, he was just the kind of bastard who didn't accept excuses, special circumstances notwithstanding.

"Didn't hear you." He dug the point of his knife into Daar's neck, letting it slide in deep enough to draw blood.

"_Please_…wanna…"

"Wanna' what? Suck my dick? Fuck a hooker? You're going to have to be more specific. I said you're going to have to fucking _beg_, you waste of fucking _air_- did you know they were my two best friends? Did you know guys like me don't really get friends? Did you know how much it _fucking hurt, not getting there in time_? This is nothing, _pig_, you fucking cocksmoking piece of _shit_- this is _not good enough_." He tipped his head in a short sharp jerk of a nod toward the discarded gun on the floor, toeing it with one boot. "I could jam this gun up your asshole and unload the entire fucking mag into your colon, and it wouldn't be enough. _Beg_."

"Please_…please_…"

Another one-handed yank put him nose to nose with that eerie spell-peeled wreck of a face, and a smooth arc forward of his neck fired the glob of saliva he'd been storing up just for this moment into the fucker's left eye.

Foosteps in the hallway outside brought his hand up through a quick snake-dart of a jab that made that saliva-glossed eye frost over in a milky death cataract; he left the knife in Daar's jugular and pulled his hands shaking away, sliding down off the lounge onto his feet.

The post-torture shits; he wasn't quite as fucked up as he suspected, then, because he had that ominous little roil of nausea in his stomach that told him he better make it to a fucking garbage can quick, only he didn't have time-

The door at his back swung open, and he lunged.

He closed the distance in a leap he turned into an elbow strike that came smoothly up and around into the man's jaw hard enough to stagger him back out into the hallway, and his follow-up blow jabbed a skinned-knuckle bear claw into the soldier's exposed windpipe with a gunshot rattle.

He took off down the hall at a dead sprint.

The sword in his hand swept up through a loop that punched through the chest of a soldier stepping out from a compartment up ahead of him, and when it hung up on the ribcage he tried to jerk it squealing out of, he left it there.

He didn't have time to stop- they were everywhere all of a sudden, and apparently his fucking recon skills were a lot shittier than he'd originally thought, because there were a fuck ton more Galbadians on this train than he'd first estimated. What the fuck- an entire goddamned squad for one pants-wetting idiot on his way to D-District?

Of course, they'd had as much and more for him when he did his stint at the prison, but those shackles had left enough maneuvering room for him to gouge out the eyes of his escort and nearly escape through a window before the train could gather enough speed to prematurely end his daring leap onto the tracks underneath. He sincerely doubted Daar had managed anything half so fucking impressive.

He ran out of luck three steps shy of the door connecting to the next hallway down; his boot hit the blood slick from the last soldier who'd tried to get in his way and upended him with the reverberating crack of his head bouncing off the floor. For just a moment he could see only endless celestial black, dotted with the gem-clusters of white-winking semi-conciousness that was his brain struggling to bring him back into the fold; a squint brought the world back into focus around him, and turned that endless celestial black into a constellation of rifle snouts dead-centered on his chest.

And because he was Seifer Almasy, because he did not go down without a fight or give up the ghost without one long, drawn-out bloody fucking struggle, he slapped the nearest barrel away and kipped back onto his feet with a dexterous arch of his spine, and he came at them all with the blurring tornado fury of a Ruby Dragon in rut.

* * *

><p>The first time he knew he was going to die, everything became this cinema effect of time-slowed kicks and punches and sword slashes all around him.<p>

This is how he sees everything now: the blood from his gauntlet-ripped lip does not so much spray as arc gracefully out in tiny asthetically-pleasing droplets of ruby that spatter the face of the soldier directly in front of him. Every chin he splits and tooth he breaks fractures open while he is already halfway through his next turn or duck or attack, and every blade hack that slides rippling overhead skims a few hairs from his head but does not reach skin, because the corridor is too narrow for any real range or leverage, and because he is just that fucking good.

And excuse him if he throws in a little theatrical flair: hands open and gesturing come-and-get-it flickers of invitation with fingers that stream blood and jab gnarled humps of broken knuckle crookedly toward the ceiling.

The important thing is not how or why or when you die, but how much of a bang you go out with.

The important thing is how many of them you take down with you.

He's on three and counting- four- and there is fire in his blood and a grim white-lipped smile on his face, and he stiff-arms a knife strike across a neck and a red-painted backfist up against a temple and he slices one hand up to slap a rifle barrel clanging away-

And a gun butt slides whisking down to crack him across the jaw and another swings up from an armored hip to hammer an organ-rupturing blow to the stomach-

Spinning ceiling panel and smeared blobs of corridor tile corkscrewing up to meet his face, and he's sorry Quistis he wishes he wasn't so goddamned _stupid_-

He snarls a wrist lock around a fist that looms like a shadow above his face and uses this new leverage to twist himself panting back to his feet, and one expert jerk of his hand torques the joints screaming around the wrong way, and now it is the soldier who is screaming-

In the end of course, there are just too many even for Seifer Almasy.

The first slug blows him to his knees.

The second whites out his whole world.

* * *

><p>Trabia Garden<p>

Trabia

Four Years ago

T. Garden is Galbadia Garden all over again, in miniature.

Lot damn colder, though.

He hikes his rifle up over one shoulder and strides in like he owns the place, thumb hooked in his belt loop and his come-and-get-yourselves-some-of-this-ladies smile firmly in place, and the first thing he sees as his boots clop an echoic cave acoustics of a step forward is the smile he has loved since he was a smitten six-year-old trading stolen brownies for kisses.

He drops Exeter.

The smile wobbles a little, flattens out for a moment, and then once more it is shining just as brightly and steadily and cheerfully as the sun at his back, burning a hole through patchy gray stratums of winter skyline.

"Hiya!" She flicks a cute little wave at him and starts forward with a little preliminary skip: her stride is not so much a walk as a series of graceful bounces. "You're the G. Garden SeeD, huh? My name's Selphie!"

He stands with his hat slumped halfway down across his eyes and both arms at his sides, and he can only stare.

"Um…you dropped your gun." She flickers a little you-in-there wave past his eyes and knots both hands awkwardly in front of her skirt, just for a moment; she is just like he remembers, because she does not let the quiet stretch on for long, and an astonished half second of silence later, she opens her mouth again. "I'm your welcoming committee! Headmaster Lankost sent me down here to meet ya'. He's waiting for you in his office." She stands on her tiptoes to examine his hat-shaded eyes, her nose a fractional half-centimeter from his own. "Hello? You ok?"

A cough clears his throat and unearths his voice, and a nervous half-flick of his tongue dampens his arid lizard-scale lips. "Selphie?"

"Yep!" she chirps. "Selphie Tilmitt, at your service!" Her hand envelops his with the enthusiasm of some swaggering meat-head of a gym rat, except this palm press is good-naturedly animated and too small to cause any real damage, and he winds his long sun-browned fingers around hers in a moment that stretches into awkward sweaty eternity.

He forgot to wipe his hand off- he forgot to wipe his Hyne-damned _hand _off, and now her first impression of him after all these years and years of separation is going to be moist fingers and his weapon in a pile at his feet-

He forgets this a moment later when his chest unlocks around his heart and he is suddenly too happy to be startled anymore; she is _here_, she is standing right in front of him with that smile in her eyes and on her lips and it is like he never had to spend years scraping by without her wondering if she is happy and loved and still thinking about him and he can't _believe _it-

"_Selphie_!" The grin in his voice pops his jaw, and he forgets Exeter in a shiny heap at his feet and pulls her into his arms hard enough to bump his hat down all the way over his eyes now, but he does not want to let go of her with either hand long enough to tip it back upright. He stands with his cheek against the top of her head, breathing the smell of her hair. She is warm and soft and shaped so very, very differently from little green-eyed Selphie burying her toys in Matron's garden, and if he can stay like this forever, if he can _die _like this, it's all right with him. "I didn't know you ended up at a Garden, too! I never knew where any of you ended up, you know, but Selphie honey, I'm so glad to-"

"Um, 'scuse me, Mr. G. Garden SeeD?" She taps plaintively at his elbow, and he pulls back just far enough to see down into her eyes. "Sorry; I forgot your name. I'm happy you're here too- Headmaster Lankost says you're the best sharpshooter out of any of the Gardens! And we need the best, for this mission. I'm not a SeeD yet, but I got approval to come along, 'cause they need someone who's good with mechanical stuff, and that's me! But you're kinda' squishing me." She reaches one hand up to tilt his hat back up out of his eyes, and her gaze is politely welcoming, and nothing else.

And suddenly his uncaged heart leaks out all over his boots, because he finally understands what he has failed to realize in his exhilaration.

She does not know who he is.

He lets his arms flop limply out away from her, to swing uselessly dangling along his sides.

He's thought about her every day since he left the orphanage. He has dreamed about her and compared every girl he has ever met to her, and he has always told himself that someday they will find each other again, someday he is going to hold her in his arms and let her smile warm his heart-

And there is not even a flicker of recognition in her eyes. There is not even a brief faint hint of acknowledgment that he reminds her of someone she used to know, just a little.

He is a little puddle on the floor beside his rifle, but she does not need to know this, and he puts a slouch in his shoulders and a drawl in his voice and he hooks both thumbs casually back through his belt loops-

"Come on!" Her voice is bright and cheerful and familiar and it twists the knife in his heart, it turns his face slanting off to one side to squint blurrily out into the distance until he can bring himself back under control again-

"Here!" She is struggling underneath Exeter's weight, holding it tremulously out to him. "Oof, this is heavy! You must be strong, huh?"

He is devastated, but he is still a man. He finds a smile that stretches smoldering across his lips, and he lets her get an accidental brush of his bicep when she deposits Exeter in his arms and pulls bouncing away. "You're cute! You gotta' girlfriend, Mr. G. Garden SeeD? I have a friend who'd really like you. Hey, what's your name?"

He swallows the lump in his throat, and slings Exeter back over his shoulder. "Irvine. Kinneas."

"Well, Mr. Irvine Kinneas, right this way!" she says with an expansive sweep of her arm, preceding him down the hallway.

He follows her all the way to the Headmaster's office without saying anything.

* * *

><p>He pulls off his mission without a hitch. One red-running third eye of a shot later and good-bye Mr. Corrupt Politician, hello 5,000 gil wired automatically to his steadily-expanding account.<p>

Nuthin' to it.

He vomits only a little in the first floor bathroom on his way back to the dorm room they have assigned him overnight.

One of his instructors once told him he wasn't really cut out to be a soldier- too soft, prone to hesitation. It was all right to not like killing- it was a whole 'nother issue, with those whack jobs- but regretting it, letting it eat you up inside- well son, that was a can of worms, too. Couldn't think about the person on the other end of the sights- gotta' see 'em like a target, just a three-dimensional sheet of paper without a family to come home to, human-shaped silhouette all filled in with shoot n' see fluorescent.

He didn't like hurting his training partners. Agonized too long over a broken nose here, a spell burn there; shook like a whore in church after the killin', especially if the victim were female.

But there was that whole great marksmanship thing.

And that was all they really needed in the end, wasn't it? They'd use him up and throw him out, and there wasn't a Hyne-damned thing he could do about it, because what else did he know? What else could he _do_, except shoot straight and nail chicks and take his orders and keep his mouth shut?

There is nothing else in this world that he understands.

He is sauntering past the quad with Exeter over his shoulder and one thumb through the loop of his belt when this laugh he has held onto for all these years and years of separation stops him dead in his tracks, and swings his head through a long slow trajectory that brings it around toward the open-air quad on his left.

She is standing on a stage, directing cadets: one, two, three, demanding little points like jabs of knife attack, and on the last she looks up and sees him.

Her smile reminds him of the sun coming out, it is that bright. He shifts Exeter and brings his arm up in a little listless half-wave, faking an answering smile, and when she jumps off the stage with a loud boot-clop of a landing, his heart goes suddenly turbocharged against his chest.

He is nervous. He is Irvine Kinneas, and he is not supposed to get nervous- it is the women who are supposed to blush and stammer and flick their eyes shyly slanting downward, twisting their hands together.

But he is nervous all the same as she jogs still smiling toward him, and he hopes he is hiding it better than he thinks he is. He shifts Exeter again because he needs something to do with his hands, because the thumb in his belt has suddenly become frantically sweating deadweight, and a casual pass across the right sleeve of his duster wipes the moisture from his palm and the tremor from his fingers; he ratchets up that smile, and tips his hat.

She slides to a stop in front of him that he thinks is not going to happen in time, and for just a fleeting moment he pictures her careening right into his arms, skidding over the floor into a messy pile against his chest, where he can keep her until she regains her equilibrium.

"Hi!" She clasps both hands behind her back and tips upright on her toes to add two inches to her height, and she juts her chin out and cranes her head to one side like she is trying to peek around a corner. He tastes his heart in his throat, because her stare is so very level and unblinking and _penetrating_, and some heartbreaker he is because he can feel his palms starting to sweat again-

"Your hair's really shiny. Whatdaya' put in it? I wish mine looked like that! Can I touch it?" She is already stretching one hand out for it, and he swallows as her fingers graze the long tail of hair half-thrown over one shoulder, and bump up against the line of his neck. "We're getting ready for our Spring Festival; wanna' help decorate? You're soooo tall." She drops back down flat-footed, and dimples up at him. "We need someone to hang the higher decorations."

His mouth is open to reply when she suddenly has him by the hand, and now he is getting tugged along behind her with his rifle bouncing on his shoulder and his hat sliding down into his eyes, and a little startled grunt of a protest is the only thing he can manage before she begins to chatter again.

"Hey, guys, look who I got! This is Irvine, and he's gonna' help us!" She slips her fingers around his wrist to flap his hand in a cheery little wave at the small army of uniformed cadets scrambling around the quad, and bounces on her toes a little. "Ooh, wait, I just had a better idea!" Her turn is a blindingly quick pirouette that startles him, and her hand comes up through an arc that twitches his hat back up off his eyes. "Do you know how to dance?"

He spends half a second too long blinking down at her. "Yeah; G. Garden makes us take classes, for political functions and SeeD balls and stuff."

"Goody! Ok, here's what we're gonna' do, Mr. Kinneas!" She puts her hands on her hips and a mockingly serious lip pucker on her face, and she shifts one hand up to brush his hat again, only this time she snags it off his head and swings it down toward hers, positioning it carefully. "Hey, neato! Gaiden, how do I look?" She turns to pose for a friend, cocking her head and kicking one leg up out to the side.

She does not wait for an answer before turning around again. "Can you teach me how to dance? Headmaster Lankost cancelled all our dance classes until he can get a replacement instructor, and I had to take some make-up history classes during that time period, so I missed most of them. I don't wanna' be the only one who can't dance at the Festival!" She flares her eyes as wide as she can get them. "Pleeeease?

He lets his patent Casanova smile wrinkle up his eyes and hooks his thumb back through his belt, and his slouch is calculatedly casual, except none of it seems to be having any effect on her, none of it seems to matter at all, and his heart thundering up against his chest is slithering somewhere down inside his gut again, and if he tries to hold onto her gaze any longer he is going to blurt out something stupid.

He's loved her since they were children. She used to let him practice kissing her sometimes behind the trees at the edge of the beach, and it was the best thing that ever happened to him; years later he still remembers holding her sandy face in his hands and exploring those cutely puckered lips, and how can she just have let this all slip through her fingers? How can she look him eye to eye and hold him by the hand and say his name and not _have it mean anything to her_? How could she _do _this to him?

He asked her to marry him with a piece of licorice he knotted deftly into the shape of a ring. And when Zell ate it, she shoved his face into one of Quisty's sandcastles hard enough to knock the entire thing over and bring the little blue-eyed blonde wailing from the porch, Seifer on her heels waving his sword.

He does not remind her of any of this.

He sets Exeter down on the stage and holds out his hands and he watches her smile go nuclear, and something inside of him goes just as hot and bright and white-

And she steps into his arms with his hat on her head and that smile in her eyes and together they step out in synch, like they are of one mind or joined at the hip, and he remembers-

Nighttime fireworks and clean rain-scent in a sunrise sky and brushstrokes of foam swallowing white-gold sand-

And she just keeps _smiling _at him, happily and obliviously, and he has never thought anything would hurt this badly before, not pulling the trigger or hunching alone over a sink splashing vomit from his face; it feels like waking up alone in a bed next door to a stranger he hardly talks to, endless echoing isolation that makes him think about mothers with garden dirt under their nails and little blonde boys building forts with him out of little blue-eyed Quisty's books.

When she walks him back to his dorm room hours later, she hands his hat back with a smile, and scuffs one toe shyly against the ground. He leans his gun up against the door and loops his arms around her waist, and before she can blink or duck or pull away, he brings his lips softly down against hers.

She gives a startled little squeak, but does not push him away.

And perhaps, for just a moment, there is something, flint strike fleeting inside her mind and her heart, something instinctive that remembers his touch or the graze of his breath across her cheek, because suddenly they are smashed up against one another, suddenly her hands are tangled up in his coat and he is half-holding her up by the arms, because she is not paying attention to standing anymore.

His back hits the door behind him with a thud and she slants forward into a lean that becomes a fall, and somehow her legs are tangled up in his or he's got his tangled up with hers, and now they are sitting in a heap on the floor with their arms around each other and his coat spread out like a puddle around them.

She blinks up at him like she is just coming out of a long lazy afternoon nap, and he wants to find out if this is what she really looks like when she first wakes up, he wants to know what it's like to fall asleep with her in his arms and get up next to her in the morning, and the question sticks in his throat and burns in his chest, and he cannot ask it.

Want to come inside- this is what he wants to ask, four words he cannot unglue from his tongue, and now it doesn't matter anyway, because she is extracting herself with a blush, adjusting her skirt and yanking up her stockings and brushing off the shoulders of her jacket like this encounter has somehow dirtied it.

Her cheeriness is sharp and brittle and too-loud, and it stabs him like shards of glass, prickling in his chest. "Nice to meet ya'!"

She skips off down the corridor, and he does not see her again.

* * *

><p>Present Day<p>

Balamb Garden

"So, doc, any idea on when I'm getting out of here?"

Kadowaki adjusted the drip in his arm and flicked a glance down at the clipboard in her hands, and the smile on her face brought one to his own; he shifted underneath the layer of blankets he'd peeled back to his lap, folding his hands behind his head.

"Vitals look good. Lungs seem to be working just fine, and you're eating better. Got a little color in your cheeks, too." She poked one of them with the pencil in her hand and gave him another fond little smile, hobbling forward one arthritically stiff step to squint down at one of the machines beside his bed. "I'd like to have someone here to pick you up and take you home, just to be on the safe side- I'd feel better knowing there was someone around to keep an eye on you. Zell and Seifer should be back soon, shouldn't they?"

"Today." He nodded, stretching one hand down to scratch the IV line in his opposite arm. Damn thing itched again. "They're gonna' pick up Ellone from the orphanage and bring her back here to see me."

"That'll be nice. A whole welcome-home committee." She made her way carefully back toward her desk, taking little hobbling steps that made him frown. She set the clipboard down on her desk and heaved herself into the chair behind it with a sigh, slipping her glasses off to grope wearily at both sleep-gummed eyes with one shaking hand. "Hopefully Seifer's managed to keep himself out of enough trouble to not warrant another visit here as anything more than a concerned friend. I swear, that boy's been put back together so many times it's like trying to fit just one more piece into a jigsaw puzzle."

"He's just spirited." Irvine laughed.

"Spirited, my ass," she grumbled, putting her glasses back on. "Hyne help us if he and Quistis go their own separate ways- at least she balances him out slightly. And it's nice to see him happy."

"Funny how that worked out."

"Eh? The two of them, you mean? Yes, sometimes you see the strangest things here. They make an odd sort of sense, though. Seifer needs to rein in his impetuousness; Quistis needs to let hers out just a little sometimes." Kadowaki smiled and leaned both elbows down on her desk, smearing fingerprints from her glasses with the sleeve of her coat. "Is there anything you'd like to talk about, Irvine?"

"Like?"

"Well," she said thoughtfully, setting her glasses aside on the desk, "Seifer let it slip that you were having some difficulties adjusting. In an emotional aspect."

He sat for a long time blinking soundlessly up at the ceiling, hands folded in his lap and his head back against the railing, one foot tapping out a little sock-muffled rhythm on the hump of blankets at his feet.

"It isn't unusual. You've been through a lot lately. I know you haven't really talked to any of your friends about how much it hurt to lose Selphie- Quistis expressed concern to me over this."

A casual one-shouldered shrug shifted the gown across his back, and he glanced down from the ceiling to the knots of his fists on top of his thighs, pale scar-speckled white. "Ain't gonna' change anything, if I talk about it," he said quietly. "She's still dead, ain't she, doc?"

"Talking won't change what happened, but it can help bring closure. Seifer came to me because he was very worried; it's unusual for him to talk about anything within the realm of human emotions, so it's clear to me he thought there was cause for alarm. He tells me you wanted him to help you die, to unplug your life support."

He itched a raw-gum-pink stripe of a scar across his knuckle, not looking at her. "That was weeks ago, not long after all a' this happened. I ain't gonna' lie- sometimes I still want to, just a little. When I think about her. How she's beyond me, and if I were…" He smoothed a crack in his voice with a long smooth exhale that brought him stiffly upright, clutching all his layers and layers of blankets. "If I were gone too, then I'd get to see her, you know?"

"I know," she said softly, and when he looked over at last he saw a woman in her garden planting flowers, humming and uprooting soft rain-washed piles of sand-studded earth, he saw his _mother _leaning down over him on a sagging breeze-creaking porch offering her hand-

He had to blink down at his fists for a long time before he attempted to meet her gaze again. "I'll be all right, doc. Just miss her sometimes, you know? Nothin' wrong with that."

"No, there's nothing wrong with it. We all miss her, Irvine." She sat back with a sigh, the chair squeaking underneath her. "I've been at this job too long. Seen too much death, too many children…Anyway, that's not for me to burden you with. You've got enough to handle right now. You just remember, young man, you're not alone. You've got friends who love you even if they won't own up to it, and they're not going to leave you flailing around in this world all by yourself. I want you to remember that, when you think it all just feels too hard, all right?"

"Yes, ma'am," he said with a sly little shadow of his old smile, tipping an imaginary hat.

"Good boy. Now when you get out of here, don't let that Almasy idiot lead you astray, you hear me? He isn't so bad, underneath all the grunting and the muscle flexing, but you've got a good head on your shoulders, and he's just got a hot one. He needs someone to pull his dumb ass out of the fire once in a while, hmm?"

* * *

><p>He swirls in and out of consciousness.<p>

Ceiling over his head, cream-painted and watermarked.

Something round and hard and cold as his fucking circulation-bled hands, jabbing him in the hip.

His blinks are hazed with little web-fine flickers of black, lacing together his world, all the brief little glimpses he can get of it: neglect-chewed velveteen and solemnly staring armor-gleaming rows of soldiers, fanned out around him like the lines of action figure battlefields he used to set up as a child. Inside his head someone is playing the drums, or clapping his brain between a pair of rocks or burying his mother's nails in his frontal lobe over and over and over again- he's not fucking sure what's happening anymore.

He just wants it to stop. Just fucking _stop _and let him see Quistis, let him go home to her because he made a mistake, he made a fucking _mistake _all right- all that love shit he was talking about earlier, the shit that just doesn't curdle in his goddamned veins the same way all this bloodlust still burning off in his heart does-

Maybe he was wrong- maybe coming home to her arms is more important than his hands around some fucker's throat and his boot in their gut- maybe he's going to ask her to run away with him if he yanks his ass out of this one before it gets burned, because he cannot keep _doing _this anymore, he is fucking _tired _of fading in and out of semi-awareness wondering if he's going to survive this time-

He twitches a hesitant little spasm of a leg stretch and someone belts him across the face; he watches half-moons of red explode across his eyes and slide all the way down past his nose and into his mouth, and it is not until he tastes them that he realizes he is bleeding, that he understands he is well and truly fucked this time.

His auditory comprehension drowns beneath panicked bird-flutters of heartbeat pounding in his ears, but enough slinks through for him to understand where they are taking him, and what they are going to do to him there.

And he's not going to survive it again, you know? He gets this, but what a fucking short end of the stick his life has turned out to be, what a steaming pile of _shit _this all is, because he never asked, he never even _fucking asked_, and maybe if he had, maybe if he'd just hiked up his balls and swallowed that fucking lump in his throat they'd have a house by the sea and as normal a life as two broken ex-mercenaries could carve out for themselves-

Quistis will you marry me, he thinks; it's what he's wanted to ask all along, it is what he used to ask her when he was the knight and she his sand-soiled princess, when their home was a happy laughter-filled haven that smelled like fresh lavender on the sills and cookies in the oven and why did they ever leave it in the first place, what the _fuck _possessed him to want to be a goddamned knight in the first place-

When he dies, is she going to feel it? Is she going to look up toward the sky with a tight little stone-hard knot in her chest where her heart used to be, and know that somewhere out in the world someone is lopping off his head or cutting out his heart- is she going to hole up in her room and skip classes and sift through all his old e-mails remembering him, because that would be real fuckin' nice, someone thinking about Seifer the man and not Seifer the soldier, Seifer the lapdog with the furnace for a heart and all that hatred just burning him up inside, no place to go-

"Stop moving around," someone demands.

He has enough left in him for one last 'fuck you', and a blunt-sided slap of some weapon or another slams his head back against the wall and shuts the lights off for good.

* * *

><p><em>-rinoa are you ok are you there talk to us please-<em>

"I'm fine."

_-why aren't you saying anything rinoa talk to us rinoa you know you can always talk to us right rinoa you know that right we're on your side-_

"I'm just thinking."

_-what are you thinking about rinoa we can help we can help if you'll just let us in rinoa rinoa tell us what you're thinking ok-_

"I just…I feel scared. Sometimes I kinda' remember stuff and other times I don't and it scares me and I'm not sure what to do or what's happening to me. Am I going crazy? That's what I want to know. That's what I want to know, and I'm so _scared _that maybe the answer is yes."

_-you're worrying too much rinoa you're letting his betrayal get to you it's not your fault it's _his _fault for not loving you enough what he did was _wrong _and he knows it maybe there's another woman rinoa maybe that's the only reason why you're out here alone and scared maybe it's because he just wanted to get _rid _of you all along rinoa-_

"But didn't he used to tell me he loved me? Sometimes…sometimes I remember a voice saying that, and it _sounds _like it's telling the truth, you know? It sounds so sincere that I _wanna' _believe it-"

_-you can't believe anything he says you can't believe anything any of them say rinoa after all didn't he promise to protect you didn't he always say you'd be together and he would always be there for you and look what he's done look what he's _done _to you rinoa-_

"Maybe he didn't mean to. Maybe he's scared too-"

_-don't lie to yourself rinoa rinoa _listen _to us they were all a bunch of lies he was telling you we're sorry but he doesn't love you he doesn't love you at all none of them did or they would have helped you they would have saved you before he did this to you they never would have let him get away with this if they really loved you-_

"So…so I'm all alone?"

_-you're not all alone rinoa you have us remember us rinoa we'll always be here for you we're always going to love you no matter what so don't worry don't worry we're always going to be here for you-_


	11. Interlude Five

_Dear Selphie,_

_Been thinkin a lot lately about mortality and all that. Morbid I know, but kinda hard not to consider what happens after it's all over and how bad it hurts and if you get to see your loved ones again when you got guys dyin all around you and all your nights are just this big long blur of wondering when it's gonna be your turn. Did you ever think about what it was gonna feel like and where you were gonna end up, before it happened, Selph honey?_

_I always wonder that- where you ended up, I mean. Never been a big believer myself- you know that- but I'd like to think there's somethin' after death, you know- I'd like to think you're someplace pretty, on a stage singin your heart out._

_Sometimes I have dreams about it. You won't remember- you never did, Hyne-damn GFs- but I saw the stage at T. Garden before Galbadia launched those missiles, and you were standing on it and I just stopped and all I could do was stare, Selphie. I hadn't seen you in so long, and you didn't even remember me, and it hurt, it hurt a lot, but I couldn't help smiling, seeing you up on that stage in your element. I still think about that day a lot._

_It was the first time I thought I'd lost you. I realize now I didn't even have a Hyne-damned clue what it really felt like, to know that there's this big wide world just out there and you're nowhere to be found in it, because at G. Garden I always knew that even if we weren't together, even if I never got to see you again, at least you were somewhere being happy, maybe even with another man, but I always _knew _that ya see, I always knew you were happy because it was the only way I could ever picture you. _

_When you lose someone, you never really understand it at first. You think they're just waiting around the next corner, it's some kinda joke because they've always been there and they _can't _just be gone; doesn't make any sense. _

_That's what I told myself for days after you were gone. I didn't get it- people kept clapping me on the back and telling me how sorry they were and that you were in a better place and how time heals all wounds and all that crap and I remember just standing there thinking what the hell are they talking about? And then there was the funeral, and there you were in that box and man I couldn't _breathe_- I just couldn't breathe standing there looking down at you because it was like getting punched in the face._

_I didn't cry at the funeral. I was just so stunned, you know? But back at Garden, I went into the bathroom to take a shower because all I could smell was death, and I stepped under that water and I just lost it, and I'll never be sure how long I stood under that showerhead goin all pruney with Zell banging on the door, crying my eyes out._

_That was the first time I really got it. Took me long enough, didn't it, Selph honey?_

_Supposed to be stages to grief- the denial, the anger, the acceptance, all a that, but it's like I'm stuck or something, because I just can't accept it at all. I understand that you're gone- I _know _that, but I'm never gonna be ok about it, and it's been almost a year now and sometimes it still hurts just as much as it did that day of the funeral standing under that shower. Sometimes I look at Seifer and Quisty and there's this horrible little part of me that hates that we didn't get the happy ending too, that wants to know why these other couples around me laughing and holding hands and going to sleep in each other's arms get to keep all of that when we didn't. It's not that I don't want Almasy and Quisty to be happy- they both need it, maybe more than all the rest of us, Seifer especially after everything that bastard's gone through. But why does it have to be one or the other? Why can't we all be happy? Why did Rinoa have to leave us so soon after you, Selphie; it's like there's somethin out there chippin away at the group and they're takin us one by one, and I'm always afraid I'm gonna be the last one left, all alone with all these graves lined up on the beach and just the empty sand and all the gulls overhead. _

_You know, I think Almasy's scared of that too, not that he'd ever admit it. But I was thinking the other day about how he just throws himself into shit, how he's always gotta be on the front lines, first one out there on the charge…and I know he's got all these dreams of glory and going down like a legend and all a that, but sometimes I think that's just what he tells himself, and the real reason he's doin it is so he doesn't have to live with losin someone else. He's lost a lot, that guy, and he keeps picking himself up and dusting off and gettin on with his life and sometimes I wish I was that Hyne-damned tough, but I can't say I'd ever be able to go through everything he has and still get up in the mornings, Selphie. _

_You woulda liked him, I think, if you'd had more time to know him, the real him, not the guy he wants everyone to see. You gotta dig for a while, but there's a better man in there underneath all the shit, and I used to be all confused about Quisty likin him because she's smarter than all of us combined, but I gave him a chance and I see why now, Selph, and I wish you'd got to meet him. _

_I just wish you were here, period._

_I miss makin paper snowflakes, darlin, and you better Hyne-damned believe _that's _somethin I never thought I'd say. _

_I just miss everything about you. Maybe I don't believe much in Hyne or an afterlife or any of that, but I hope there is a better place, and I hope you're in it, and I hope you're waitin for me. I love you._

_Love, _

_Irvine_

**A/N: Ok, so some news about this story- I'm going to take a little hiatus. My writing is going fine, I have a ton of chapters/interludes stocked up, so no worries about me abandoning the story, but I kinda' feel like I'm dying here audience-wise- I don't think I've pulled more than a single review per chapter for several chapters now. I really hope this is not a reflection of the Seiftis fandom in general taking a nosedive, because I still have way more shit to write about those two. Anyway, I'm having a really hard time working up the motivation to actually update this story on here, so I've decided I'm just going to kick back for the next few weeks, relax, and focus on just writing instead of feeling obligated to stick to a posting schedule/stressing about whether pretty much everyone's just abandoned this fic. I hope there are at least a few of you still out there, because there's some (hopefully) interesting shit coming up; I hope you guys'll give this story a shot. Anyway, see you guys sometime early/mid-April.**


	12. Chapter Six

**A/N: I AM ALIVE! Told you guys I'd be back. Thank you thank you to those who reviewed- I think I got everyone with an actual account by PM, and for those of you who are anonymous, I'll address you more personally in my next update, but do know that I very much appreciate your reviews. My hiatus went on a little longer than expected, because I just found out recently that my state now requires mandatory apartment inspections, so I am in frantic spring cleaning mode right now. I don't have time to bang out a long author's note- in fact most of this chapter was fussed over while I was on my lunch break, since for the next week or so most of my after work hours will be consumed with cleaning. Updates will now return to their regular schedule. And Dee, for the extra little review poke today that prompted me to update now instead of waiting until this weekend, this chapter is dedicated to you. I figured if I could manage to get it up today, all the better- you guys have been waiting long enough.**

**Chapter Six**

Balamb Garden

Balamb

He leaned awkwardly against the railing watching her pace, both arms uselessly swinging at his sides and the deadweight lump of his heart in his mouth, leather-shriveled.

_Say something_: this was what he wanted to tell her. What came out instead was soundless jaw-clenched nothing, pregnant with tension.

He palmed both hands on his pants and glanced out over the ocean, away from her.

Tiny diamondine flecks of starfire winking up out of flat black canvas; that was what the ocean looked like, tonight.

"I just don't understand what you were thinking. You had to have known he would do something like this, that he wouldn't just stand around _waiting_…" She trailed off and brought the heel of one hand to her forehead, like it hurt. "What possible reason could you have had for giving him that information? And now-" Quistis broke off again, shaking her head. She came to a slump-shouldered halt facing away from him, the hand she had pressed to her head a tension-white lump against the wall now, and he took a faltering half-step forward like he could do something for her, like a touch on her elbow or the faint pressure of his fingertips against her back would even help-

It wasn't him she wanted touching her. It wasn't his arms around her waist or his lips grazing the back of her neck that she would miss when they were suddenly not there anymore and he had to _stop thinking like this_, he had already lost Rinoa and he would not let Quistis slip herself inside his chest like a blade reaching for his heart, he could not _do _this, not again, not when he still could not quite let go of a field and a promise and a pretty pink-lipped smile-

The railing underneath him creaked and he eased his weight just slightly off it, his hands folding together behind his back.

"He knew the risks when he left." It was the only thing he had to offer her, and it came out colder than he'd meant it to. He glanced away again, tightening his fingers.

"You shouldn't have given him Daar's whereabouts in the first place! I-" She hissed out a sigh that slouched her back against the wall, her face in one hand. "I'm going to lose him, Squall."

His heart squeezed itself into a little knotted fist inside his chest. "Quistis-" He took another tentative half-step forward, and when she did not move he turned it into a full stride that brought him within touching distance of her, close enough to smell her hair and register the heat of her body underneath all the layers and layers of midnight chill that enfolded him like little reaching arms.

Her eyes when they flicked a brisk glance of a look up at him were as flat and still and bleak as that polished mirror surface of seascape at his back. "They won't release him, Squall. Even if we could persuade Laguna to cede control of Esthar to them for his exchange, they'll still execute him. He's too dangerous for them to let a chance like this slip through their fingers."

He looked down at his feet, crossing his arms. "Laguna can't sacrifice an entire city for one man," he said quietly.

"I am perfectly aware of that." Her voice came out as flat as her eyes, toneless unemotional nothing spat up like slivers of shrapnel. "But I can't just leave him in D-District- Hyne only knows what they're doing to him right now. They'll try and get any information they can out of him before they kill him, and I _can't_-" A long slow breath brought her rising voice back under control, and a fractional little shift of her features crosswiped that painfully naked grief on her face to careful composure.

"Quistis-"

"I want to see him." She made her voice into something cold and hard and unshakable, eyeing him glacially.

He eased the knot of his hipbone back up against the railing, looking out over it again. "I can't authorize that."

"Don't lie to me," she replied coldly. "Cid got me in to see him after the war, and you can certainly do the same."

"It was different then. We weren't at war with Galbadia the first time you visited him in D-District."

"They'll agree to a ceasefire in order to carry out negotiations, I'm sure." She pushed herself off the wall and came to a shoulder-width at-ease that pulled her spine into a long military-flawless line, rigid as the steel at his back.

"There aren't any negotiations to make- we can't agree to their terms." He summoned his courage with the breath he pulled up from his lungs into his throat, and a slow careful stretch of his hand curled all five fingers around her forearm, bare skin to bare skin. "Quistis, I'm-"

She shook his hand off her and the knot in his chest unraveled into a lump in his throat, and he stepped back with one hand in his pocket and the other up against the right leg of his pants, smearing sweat.

He was standing _right here_ and she was too good for Seifer Almasy anyway, let him _die_, let him rot away in a little lightless hole with nothing but all his dried-up old fairytales and dreams and ambitions- he'd tried to kill them all once upon a time, didn't she _understand_ that? Couldn't she remember little splintered flashes of city lights off shining wolf-sharpened teeth, couldn't she _accept _that underneath this thin veneer of civility he'd perfected for her was the laughing blonde-haired boy beside his mother, flickering little come-and-get-it invitations of finger crook-

Squall reached up to rub his scar, frowning. He couldn't take Seifer's place, even if he wanted to. Maybe he'd had a chance once upon a time, maybe once he had been the only face she could see among all those rows and rows of chin-cupped cadets dozing in their seats, maybe once upon a time Seifer had never even _registered_ as a blip on her radarno matter what he did or said or refused to obey, but now-

Now she loved him and did not quite understand how to get by without him anymore. Now she loved someone who was not him, when he was finally just beginning to comprehend this little tightening ache in his chest, and it wasn't _fair_, none of it was fucking _fair_, Rinoa alone and drifting and frightened and Quistis in front of him coming apart at the seams for Seifer, for Seifer _Almasy _who would hurt her one day, who would tear her apart and forget to stitch her back together-

He squeezed his eyes shut and slanted his elbows carefully down against the railing, and for a long time he said nothing, for a long time he could only stand there seeing endless black emptiness with the breeze on his face and the saline trickle of the ocean in his nostrils, and when she took an echoic little _click _of a step forward to rest her fingertips against his shoulder, he did not even blink.

"Please, Squall. I need to talk to him." She let her voice soften toward a whisper, and now her fingers clenched into a fist she rested against the stress-tangled muscles of his shoulder. He stiffened involuntarily, flipping his eyes open. "_Please_."

"I can't- Garden can't guarantee your safety." A dry sandpaper chafe in his throat, filing off all the harsh angles: this was his voice now, this parched little murmur he didn't seem to be fully in control of anymore.

He wondered if she could hear the pressure in his chest leaking out into his voice, winding everything up tight.

* * *

><p>"Thank you," she says, and suddenly there are arms around his waist and a cheek pressed up against his back and he cannot breathe; this raw half-second of a moment stretches on like the ocean far below his feet and the sky above his head and he looks down at her hands folded into a loop at his navel and something in his chest unlocks and unwinds and spills out into a pile at his boots, and he opens his mouth to tell her something he is not ready to say.<p>

She has never touched him like this before, and it's all for Almasy, her hands on her stomach and her cheek against his shoulders and now he is shutting his mouth, now he is coiling everything back up inside of him because _Seifer Almasy _is the only one she wants to hear this from-

She is smiling softly up at him when he turns around to break her hold and this moment and all the stupid feeble hope in his heart, and suddenly there is an inferno where his chest used to be, suddenly he is just so _angry _looking down at this moon-silvered profile in the dark, because suddenly it is Seifer Almasy who has everything and Squall Leonhart who has nothing and it was supposed to be the other way around- he's one of the damn _heroes _and not the villain, after all-

He presses his face into her neck and his arms around her waist and he lets himself believe, for just a moment, that she is embracing him back, that her hands against his chest are there to brace and not push away.

He breathes, "Don't go," into her neck so quietly he knows she does not hear him, and when he pulls away at last her smile has gone crookedly uncertain.

Their faces are a scant few centimeters apart, and he will never have another chance.

"Squall-"

He can see brushstrokes of individual lashes gilded in moon-glow, blinking up at him.

Inside his mind, a little shadowy sketch of another Quistis and a different Squall bring their lips up against one another at the same time, and she fists his jacket in her hands and sighs his name like it's a benediction and he has his hips pressed up tight against hers and one hand up her shirt, fumbling-

It is not the way it will happen here, right now, in this moment that is still stretching between them, and he watches her smile go politely stiff and her hands swing down to pull his hands from her hips-

And he lets her do it. He lets his fingers go slack and his body tilt itself into a lean that slants him just subtly away from her, and he says nothing.

There is nothing left to say. There will never be anything left to say, with the ghosts of Seifer Almasy and Rinoa Heartilly between them.

* * *

><p>Deling City<p>

3 Years Ago

You are Seifer Almasy, and this is your secret:

You watch through fever-glossed eyes that show you whirling flame-painted dancers and wildly gesticulating crowds that do not have a clue what they are ushering in, and behind your fever-glossed eyes and your bright peeled-back smile you are afraid.

You are not supposed to be afraid. You are _never _supposed to be afraid, you, Seifer Almasy of the disciplinarian committee, Seifer Almasy of the biting retorts and pages-long list every cadet fears being added to-

Twin lamp circles of headlight chase little reptile flickers of shadows dancing up this float beneath your feet and this woman who used to be your mother, and inside your chest your heart gives a faulty hummingbird lurch.

The stars over your head spin pinwheels of white afterimage that hurt your brain, and even a slow and easy does it, one two three flicker of a blink does not clear them.

She turns with a smile that melts everything inside you, only this is not the sort of sensation romance movies would have you believe: this is a flashfire kindling in your chest that reaches all the way down into your stomach, and it fuses everything together, this hummingbird heart in your chest and these faulty wheezing lungs that pump air like failing bellows, and not even looking away out over the boiling crowd is enough to stop it.

Sometimes at night, when you are both just sweat-tangled heaps in the dark, breathless, she tells you she loves you.

And now you have to wonder: if your sword scrapes a long dull armor-screech of surrender along the ground, if this hand you stare down at like it has something to tell you lifts off up into the air like a bird taking flight-

Is she still going to love you?

You can fight and hate and hurt Squall Leonhart, but you cannot kill him, not even for your mother.

You turn to tell her this and a shrill pig-squeal of a tire screech hurts your ears and flinches you back against the float behind you, and you watch her hand flutter vaguely in the air and you understand now that it is too late, it has _always _been too late-

Adrenaline smears sweat down your hands and across your brow and when she turns to you with another smile you feel a leather-stiff reply stretch itself across your face.

At the base of the float Leonhart makes a long smooth leap that's going to carry him right into your waiting arms-

You will replay this moment in your head over and over again, for the rest of your life.

The first thing you always see is the very beginning, this strike that sends your blades shrieking down one another, throwing sparks.

The second is your mother's face as she watches you fail.

You didn't mean to, you want to tell her, you _tried_, you wanted to be her good little boy worthy of this love she assures you has always been here, just for you- you just don't have the _stomach_ for it- give you ten strangers, ten _innocents_, and you'll bathe in their blood, just for her, you'll roll their hearts spurting around in your hands and tear out their throats with your teeth and you'll even _enjoy _it, if that's what she wants-

But not one of _them_, you can't kill off this little fledgling family that doesn't even remember you anymore, you can't be _alone_, you are so very _tired _of being alone, sometimes-

Since his capture, hours pass like centuries. You snarl and stalk and put up a good front, you watch Squall twitch seizure spasms of neural jolt that roll screams echoing off the walls, and you even rub yourself up against her when it is all over and she pins you up against the wall with her hand in your hair and her tongue in your mouth.

You do not look back as she leads you away by the hand_- good boy you're my precious little boy you know that don't you seifer_- but your head twitches out a little tic like the aftershocks that shiver his body up against the damp mold-dripping wall at his back, and you _want _to, for just a moment, and then her mind touches yours and the fog in your brain becomes a fold of sea wave across your eyes and the only thing you can see, the only thing you _want _to see, is her smiling mother's face, two inches from your own.

* * *

><p>D-District Prison<p>

Dingo Desert

Present Day

He remembered this shit.

First the staredown, a back-of-the-neck someone's-watching prickle that made him want to laugh; he'd practically invented this shit. And gotten a hell of a lot more of a reaction than a little answering smirk, picking itself just slightly up off his teeth.

Then the questions, of course: B. Garden security measures, military strategies, the current standing of the relationship between Laguna Loire and his estranged son.

And the answers: fuck off, kiss his ass, and suck his dick, respectively.

The next part would be his least favorite, of course.

Three of them slammed him down flat against the floor hard enough to rattle every tooth in his skull and a steel-toed boot to the kneecap stopped his struggles, for just a moment. A gloved hand yanked his mouth open with a moist crackle of a jaw pop that hammered stars spinning across his eyes, and he reached out with the hand they'd forgotten to pin to hook a thumb toward the triangular slit in the guy's eye shield. Cuffed to the other, it jingled a wind chime warning that yanked the guy's head back just in time, and Seifer pulled his knees in toward his chest and jackknifed out straight again with a double front kick the guy couldn't dodge fast enough this time; someone kicked him in the ribs and there went one of the fuckers again, a loud twig-crunch of a break that pulled him into a groaning fetal huddle around it.

They rolled him ungently back into position, and a fucking boulder of a man plopped himself right the hell down on Seifer's chest, forcing his mouth open again.

He tried not to choke as the first splash hit his throat, but try telling your lungs they don't need oxygen that fucking much; they just aren't that goddamned good at listening, you know?

Forty eternal seconds- that was how long it lasted. He ticked off each in his head, fractional little minutehand clicks that swelled like an incoming tide inside his sinuses, smearing tears down his cheeks and snot down his lips and just hold it the fuck together- get a _fucking_ grip they'd stop any second now, any goddamned _second_-

The hand on his jaw eased off to let him cough, and he aimed the water he hacked up from his lungs for the fucking gorilla's face, praying this goddamned beast of a man wasn't under orders to rape him or something if he didn't cooperate.

An eyeflicker of a backhand snapped his head back against the floor; the ceiling smudged itself into a blurred watercolor over his head, dull smoke-gray cinderblock and shit-brown watermarks, all running together.

They'd all been through this same goddamned song and dance years ago- he wasn't giving them shit.

He closed his eyes as they snapped a pair of pliers shut over his right pinky nail.

The interesting thing about getting your nails yanked out was how much it didn't hurt, at first. Just a little pressure, little tearing sensation- and then a whole fucking head full of white noise and a goddamned acid-etched burning in the finger that brought every expletive he'd ever learned screaming to the forefront, jumbling up together at his lips like none of them was sure which one should go first.

"__-"

The questions started over.

Garden taught him that the way to endure torture was to focus your mind on something else, which made him think that cocksucking idiot of an instructor who'd taught the class had never been tortured before- try thinking about _anything _else while your goddamned hand was on fire and you could barely see through all the sinus irritation filming your eyes red and some asswipe's foot was buried in your stomach, shooting bile into your mouth-

He did his best anyway, though. He had Quistis' eyes to think about and Dincht down on his hands and knees playing pack mule for a bunch of cackling asshole kids and the cowboy with all that burned-off hair, learning how to breathe all over again. He probably wouldn't ever see them again, but it was nice to think about them, gave him this warm and fuzzy little glow around his heart because you know, the last time he'd been here no one had given a shit, they could have all cared less if he'd rotted to death in this stinking fucking hole, but now-

Now he knew at least they were going to miss him, you know? Now he'd have a couple of people visit his grave every so often, and not just to take a piss on it or arc a nice little spitwad into the hand-carved grooves of his name; now maybe he'd have some flowers on it, and people who'd give enough of a crap to cry and say a few words every time they stopped by. Now he wasn't just going to be a name on a headstone: Here Lies Seifer Almasy the Traitor What A Fucking Asshole.

They worked their way down his right hand: pinky first, then the ring finger, on and on- _tink tink tink_, that was the sound of his fucking nails hitting the floor underneath him, but he had Quistis' laugh and Zell's stupid fucking motor mouth to cover that all up and fuck _them _they weren't getting one goddamned word from him-

The boulder of a man on his chest wasn't here to rape him, after all, but maybe that'd have been slightly more bearable.

A drill bit whine snapped his eyes back open and brought him half up on an elbow that skidded wetly out from underneath him and _shit _fuck _him _you gotta' be goddamned _kidding _him-

1,000 RPM's of electric-powered drill ate down through the side of his knee to lodge up against the cap, and a guy could only take so fucking much: his scream bounced off the walls like a fucking woman and something belted him across the face- a hand or the butt of the drill, who the fuck even cared, right now-

And he spat blood and swung out with the glistening raw-meat pulp of his right hand, and now the drill arced up to chew a neat little diamondine hole down through the fine little bones there, all the way through to his palm on the other side.

Fuck fuck fuck _fuck _-

He'd trained through this kind of pain before; trick was to just let yourself go, give yourself over to that adrenaline folding over your tongue in a little metal-tinged trickle and down your arms out through your fingers, curling itself like a fucking hand around your bird-fluttering heart-

Neat thing about adrenaline: enough of it in your system could push even the snarl of a ligament-chewed knee to the back of the mind like it just didn't fucking matter, and now when he stood that drill yanked itself from the gorilla's hands to dangle loosely from his own palm.

His forehand into the guy's nose pulled it loose from his palm with a butcher's meat squelch, and the cord whipped a fluttering little tail back around behind it to slap him across the throat.

It didn't take them long to subdue him: six guys in armor against one stupid handcuffed asshole- not much of a challenge there.

He fought as long as he could anyway- it kept him away from the drill for that much longer, at least- until finally one of the bastards palmed Seifer's head in his hand and brought his face crashing down against the hard steel-carved bed; he felt his nose flatten back against his face, spraying moisture. Another jerk on his hair split his chin and cracked a tooth, and now the hand began to hammer away in earnest: one, two, three, and now there was a whole fucking galaxy of stars smearing past his eyes, and the blood in his throat congealed into a tacky snot-trail of clot down his tongue-

He spat, tried to reach one hand back, ate bed frame again-

The door to his cell slid open with a high insectile whine, and a thundering authoritative bark froze the hand on the back of his head mid-shove.

"Get off him. Clean this shit up; someone from B. Garden's here to open negotiations, and they want to see the prisoner first."

He slid down toward the floor as the hand in his hair abruptly let go, and only a reflextive last second toss of his arms across the bed kept him upright on his knees, swaying.

"Don't Cure him yet. I want them to see what we're doing to him. It might help make up their minds."

Quistis- it would be Quistis here to see him, _Quistis _with her soft little hands and her Instructor's voice, gently lecturing him, and he scraped his feet up underneath him and tried to stand without putting pressure on that screaming blood-dripping knee, and now suddenly his other leg wasn't working either- the bit must have clipped that one too in the struggle, and now the only thing he could do was kneel there holding this bed breathing her name in wheezing blood-bubbling gasps that painted red the single prison-issue blanket underneath him-

Someone kicked him in his good side on their way out the door, and now he did slither down into a messy red-streaked heap beside the bed, his inhalations rattling little dice in his broken nose.

* * *

><p>The sight of his face brings her hand up over her mouth, shaking.<p>

He knows this because he has managed to prop himself up on one side, forearm flat against the floor, but he cannot stand yet- he might not ever stand properly again, if they don't Cure him soon- and she has to come to him instead.

The smile on his lips hurts his nose and cracks the drying blood around his mouth but he keeps doing it anyway, because he thought he was never going to see her again, because she's _here _and he can smell her shampoo and the scent of her matching soap and it's stronger than the faint whiffs of old blood and shit that can't ever be scrubbed out of these little shitholes.

She rests her hands against his cheeks and flicks her thumbs across the blood scabbed under his nose, and a sudden spasm ripples across her brow and down through her eyes, and for just a moment, he thinks she's going to cry.

Her eyes are dry but crinkled up around the corners, like she's having to work to keep them that way, and she murmurs "What did they _do _to you," so softly he can barely even hear it.

He thinks there's room for a little levity here; he always did hate it when she cried. "Hello, Instructor. Conjugal visit?"

"I can't believe you did something so astronomically stupid," she says coldly, looking away from him.

"You can't?" He has not stopped smiling since she entered the cell, and now his whole face shoots little fingers of flame toward his neck, all the way down into his chest and its fist-clenched heart.

"Seifer, they're going to kill you if we don't agree to hand over control of Esthar! I can't ask- I could never _expect _Laguna to do that, not even for you; there are _thousands_-"

He leans his face down against her neck to feel the rumble of her voice in her throat, and she stops talking.

"We have three weeks." Her voice is a strangled little rasp of a thing, now. "Galbadia's agreed to give us three weeks to open negotiations with Laguna, and then you will be _executed_, publicly."

"Three weeks is a long time to stall, Instructor," he murmurs into her throat, folding his chained-together hands in his lap. "Laguna's not going to give up an entire fucking city for me; his son doesn't even like me. Imagine the kind of stuff Pubes has been whispering in his ear about me?"

"I know that. It gives us time to…consider other options."

"There are no other options, Quistis. Just say good-bye." He kisses her neck and looks up through his lashes, and now he is certain she is about to cry: there is this little shiny layer across her eyes that recedes back into her lashes with a long ten-second squeeze of a blink, and she gropes one hand casually beneath her glasses, like she's only scrubbing a little sleep from them.

"Do you really think I believe you are just going to go meekly to your death?"

"Meekly? Shit, no. I'm going to take twenty or so of the fuckers with me." His smile is raw and honest and it twists something inside of him that breaks off with a sharp snap like his ribs splintering under that asshole's steel-toed boot. "But do I think I'm gonna' live through it? No."

"Seifer-" Her arms loop up around his waist hard enough to hiss a grunt through his teeth, and he blinks heat-shimmering red from his eyes until it fades away: smudges of sunspots, winking out.

"Not so hard, Instructor." The pressure eases instantly, and he kisses the hollow of her throat all the way across to her shoulder, chipping dried blood off onto her collarbone.

"I'm not going to-"

"Don't fucking say anything, all right?" He frames her face with his cuffed-together hands and in his side his ribs howl protests that flash semi-conscious black across his eyes.

"Seifer, I-"

"I _said _'don't say anything', Instructor. You listen to me talk for fucking once; I sat through enough of your goddamned lectures."

She tilts her head down as much as she can manage with it clamped between his palms, and he pulls it in all the way, until it is resting against his chest and he can lean his chin down on top of it, and now he lets his eyes go hooded as he feels her arms knot themselves loosely around his waist again.

"I don't have any stupid love poetry or anything. That's that fucking moron's territory, not mine. I just have a couple of things to say: I'm going to haunt Pubes' dick, so don't even think about fucking him after I'm gone." She lets out a laugh that strangles like a clot in her throat, and he pulls her head in more tightly against his chest. "Bury all my porn with me so Dincht can't get his hands on it- that'll piss him off. And-" He slides his tongue across his lips and one thumb across the other and suddenly he can't say anything else, suddenly he is fucking _terrified _about this next line, because he is pretty sure he already knows the answer to it-

_Would you have married me, if I'd asked you to? _

"And?" she prompts him softly, and she peels her face up off his chest to look him in the eyes, and now she brings one hand up through a gentle arc that terminates against his left cheek, that wipes all the blood and spattered skin flecks from the curves of his cheekbone and the arch of his nose, and suddenly he is just fucking _overcome _with the fact that he's never going to fucking see her again-

It hurts his whole goddamned face but he kisses her anyway, the same way he did at that long-ago dance with that blinking red iris of a camera lens aimed their way- a little desperately, because he knows its his one little fucking window of opportunity and he's not going to waste it, and when she tries to handle him gently he opens his mouth and closes his teeth around her bottom lip, and if he wasn't such a goddamned invalid he'd fuck her right here on this cold dirty floor underneath them.

"I love you," she whispers when they separate, and his heart does this funny little fucking thing in his chest that feels a whole lot like a goddamned somersault, because she never says this, not since Raij and Fu died, and it's not like he needs to hear it every fucking second of the day, but sometimes it's just nice to get it, you know? Sometimes it's just fucking nice to know that nothing has changed, that she's in his arms because she wants to be and not because Pubes chose someone else.

He musters up a little sack from somewhere and squeezes both of her stiff blood-bled palms in his hands, and what the fuck, he's not kneeling but this is good enough, considering the circumstances.

"Will you…would you, if I was-" His voice cracks like a little fucking kid's, and he rasps a cough off to one side the clears the clog from his throat and the fractures from his voice. "I was going to ask you, eventually…_fuck_, how the hell does anyone do this?"

She is smiling a little now, like she knows what he's trying to ask her, and maybe she does- maybe women have some kind of intuition about this sort of shit, which means he can't puss out now, so he clears his throat again and he opens his mouth, and it all spills out about as suave as Wuss in a white T-shirt eating a hot dog.

"Fuck- would you -if I was getting out of here- I mean, if I hadn't gotten put in here in the first place- I was going to ask you anyway I just didn't have time to get anything- uh…_fuck _would you…" He tightens his fingers on hers and sucks in a slow steadying inhalation that brings the rest of his question vomiting up out of his throat in a long garbled string that makes him wince. "Fucking hell would you just marry me Instructor for Hyne's fucking sake?"

Her three second pause goes on for a fucking eternity.

"Yes."

* * *

><p>"I will when you get out of here," she says, and the smile she pastes on across her lips hurts as much as his must.<p>

She holds his face very gently between her hands, and she can tell even this featherweight pressure hurts him, but he doesn't peel her fingers away.

He leans into them, and smiles.

It is hard to believe that this was once the smile she only sort of tolerated, beaming out at her from the back of her classroom. It has always been a nice smile on a handsome face- when it is not twisted into something wryly mocking, of course- but it's never been enough for her, not with Squall Leonhart sitting just three desks away staring blandly back at her, waiting to be unmasked.

And now her heart squeezes and her stomach flips like an acrobat and there's a long thin line of warmth smoldering along her lash line because she just cannot make herself _believe _this is the last time she's ever going to get to see it she will _not _believe it-

He is brushing his lips along her knuckles, each individual one like he's trying to memorize them all, and she cannot believe this either, this blood-crusted down of bang graze tickling the back of her hand and this long smooth susurration of his mouth across her skin-

As his instructor, she'd always catalogued his headstrong brutality and his filthy language and the casually disdainful angle of his body, both feet up on his desk and his hands behind his head, and nothing else. It was Squall who always got the benefit of the doubt, the certainty that underneath the vacant stares and the faint twist at the corner of his mouth that was the only sign of emotion he ever deigned to show was a man just waiting to be coaxed from his shell, a man who would love her, if not publicly, then with more than enough fairytale passion in private to make up for it.

Seifer Almasy was a nasty bully who would never amount to anything, because he would not _conform_, not the way Garden needed him to if he were to fit the institutional mold it had shaped for them all, and so even though she had hated to, even though she despised giving up on any student, ever, she had let go all her hopes and dreams and ambitions for him.

And now he has both hands around hers and she cannot find the bully anywhere within him, and even in this fetid hole with his leg dripping blood and his nose a clot-tacky pile of meat on his face his smile spreads all the way to his eyes, just because she is here with him-

And she can't just give this up. She gave up on him once and almost did not get him back, and now when she finally understands what the world is going to be like without him, she is not going to let it happen again. She _will not_.

He twists his fingers into her hair and her heart gives an abbreviated _thwack _of a pulse thump against her chest.

She does not want to leave his arms; she knows it is childish and stupid, but if she can only hold _on_, if she can just keep him here like this, forever, nothing can or will or would ever dare presume to touch them, and he will go on kissing her forehead and the burn-scar on her cheek, and she will swing wildly back and forth between loving him and plotting his murder and they will be _happy_, that's all she _wants_, doesn't she deserve this, don't they _both _deserve this much at least, at last-

He murmurs words she cannot quite make out against her cheek, and into her neck; maybe they are not words at all, but half-coherent noises he cannot quite bear to turn into actual speech, because the only things left to say are farewells neither of them can stand to acknowledge.

He thinks he loves her more; she can tell this by the way he looks at her sometimes, with a soft shadow of a smile on his lips and in his eyes, but here is the real secret:

She may have fallen last, but when she landed it rocked the entire world around her and blasted the breath from her chest and all the clinging half-hopeful fantasies of Squall Leonhart from her heart, and now she can never even attempt to explain how she feels about him.

It's more than anything she has ever felt before.

Once upon a time child Quistis stood upon a doorstep unwanted and alone and frightened, trying to pretend the moisture on her cheeks was only another layer of fresh storm water, hissing down from the clouds overhead, and she believed, truly, deep down, that this was the most she would ever feel, the most _anyone _would ever feel: smothering tightness in her throat and her chest and isolation going on forever, like the dark mouth-gape of a well with no bottom-

Except she knows differently, now.

It's this man with his scarred blood-painted face pressed up against her forehead, holding one of her hands to his cheek.

This is the most she's ever going to feel, and she can never, in a million years, with all her years and years of carefully-dictated reports and diligent language study and painstakingly-cultivated instructor's tone-

She can never even begin to describe what he means to her.

She picks her hand up off his cheek and moves it down to her thigh, and she tightens up every loose dangling end in her voice, all the little cracks and rivulets she knows will begin to feather it around the edges, if she speaks now.

His smile goes hazy at the corners, like it's trying to slide off his face and he will not let it, and she can see that he knows, he _understands_ even if he does not want to-

It's time for her to go.

She is not going to say goodbye.

She finds his lips blindly, with her eyes shut, and his hands come up again to brush jangling across her cheeks and slide back into her hair, and for a very long time they sit on the cold damp-leaking floor just holding one another, and they are each too afraid to let go first.

He pushes her away after this infinite moment that is not infinite after all, that only feels like an eternity for one little sliver of a second, and he holds her at arms-length with the smile back on his face, except this time she can tell it is not real.

They both pretend his hands are not shaking. "Get out of here, Instructor. Come back and see me when I can throw you down on the bed and fuck your brains out."

She stands without saying anything.

He waves from the floor with his smirk firmly in place and she turns her back on him with her head held high and her eyes rigid slashes in her face that do not leak tears, and she walks to the door without another word or even a look back.

She's getting him out of here, regardless of cost.

And then she is going to kill him, for being so predictably, recklessly stupid.

* * *

><p>His leg hurts like a bitch, but what hurts even more is his chest, squeezing itself into a fist like the one in his throat.<p>

He is hoping she will at least look back at him, just for a moment, just a _second_, he just wants to see her face one last time-

But the insistent rap rap rap of her white-knuckled knock brings a guard that slides the door hissing aside with one swipe of the card in his hand and a hollow thud of a boot clop carries her over the lip of his cell down onto the steel mesh of the corridor outside, and in the end she doesn't look back at him after all.

Not once.

Something inside of him frays and twists and fractures into pieces, and mother_fucker_ everything _hurts _he just wants a little fucking sleep and one goddamned big-assed blast of Cura-

But he waits until he can't hear her anymore, and then he closes his eyes and lays back down and he prays for sleep or death or unconsciousness- whatever the fuck is going to bring the most relief, fastest.

* * *

><p>His shoes slid little squeaking hops of forward momentum across the linoleum in his kitchen: jab, cross, hook, backfist, and he still couldn't stop thinkingabout Seifer in one of those lightless little boxes getting the shit beat out of him or hyperventilating with his face between his knees or flailing around in the dark, panicking with no quarter moon of sun glare leaking down through bars that didn't exist, not in D-District's isolation cells-<p>

Didn't they know he was claustrophobic after his first stint in that place, have a fucking _heart_, man-

He let his fists fall and his shoulders droop and his head hang, because Galbadia wouldn't care about any of that, would in fact only use it against him, and standing here in this kitchen with his arms uselessly hanging and his chest pumping overexerted sighs that were almost sobs-

He just…Almasy had _grown _on him, he didn't _want _to give him up, he'd already given up Selphie and Rinoa and maybe one day he would have to give someone else up as well, maybe Ellone resting upstairs in his bed or Squall at his desk staring down at all those mounds and mounds of paperwork and it just wasn't _fair_, you know?

He liked to think he was a good guy, one of the heroes, and not even the gray-area morality Almasy spent most of his time splashing around in, but good versus evil, simple as that, everything starkly carved out into neat little categories of right and wrong and he always tried so _hard _to make sure he picked the right one, you know? It was the whole reason he'd joined Garden in the first place.

Didn't he deserve something for that? Some kind of break, a little prize: here ya' go Zell, for being such an exemplary human being here's a friend who's not going to leave too soon, who's still going to be there when you're old and gray and swinging a grandkid around by the hands-

"Zell?" Her soft little question startled him half a foot into the air; he twisted around to find her standing at the foot of the stairs, her hair a halo of sleep-ruffled brown around her face, both eyes luminescent against her washed-out skin.

Man, she was just so _pale _all the time now.

He shoved both hands into his pockets and stood looking up at her, three steps above him with both arms crossed over her chest, hunched in on herself.

He wanted to hold her until somehow everything was all right, like somehow Ellone Andrin in his arms could tilt the whole world back onto its axis, nudge it spinning back into its proper rotation, but the thing was you could hold onto someone as hard as you could, clutch them up against your chest like they were your last dying wish, and it'd all just fall away under your feet anyway, everything tumbling faster and faster in scattering dominoe stacks of crumbling civilization.

This was what life was all about, he was starting to learn: loving and losing and getting it all yanked out under your feet like a carpet, letting _go_, even when you were trying not to, even when you had your sweaty hand wrapped up tight around it all.

"Zell, are you all right?"

His hands in his pockets became fists that bulged his pants out around them, and he watched her eyes flicker down to them and a subtle crease mark of frown crawl up between her eyebrows. "I'm uh…yeah, I'm fine. I just…Quisty's at D-District right now visiting Seifer, and…"

She moved down one step, and then another, until he could look her almost eye to eye.

He looked away, because that was not where he wanted to stare right now, into that softly sympathetic face that was never going to be anything more than another friend who would leave him one day, who would make him promises and reassurances and then go ahead and die anyway.

It was what Selphie had done, after all.

"I know you're afraid for him," she said gently, stepping down onto the kitchen floor beside him.

"I'm not, I just…uh, did you know, I mean, it's not like he would ever admit it to anyone, but I know because we got thrown into jail in Balamb together when we beat up this drunk who groped Quisty one time, but he's…he's freaked out by the dark, and tight spaces, and it just…I mean, it sucks that he's there, you know? That he's alone, and stuff."

"Zell." She brushed a hesitant graze of a touch down his forearm, and he looked away, squinting out over his living room until the light fuzzed into an actinic corona around it all: all his furniture and framed table-displayed pictures and the mountainous lump of Freeloader asleep on the couch, one paw twitching.

"Hey, you want something to eat?" he asked, forcing brightness into his voice, summoning it up out of his stomach through his chest and into his throat where it stuck like a rock, sandpaper wrapped.

"No. Zell, if you need to talk, I'm listening. Please don't shut me out."

It was all she had to say to crumple him, to cut his legs off at the knees, because the look on her face came out of nowhere like a slap to the balls and left him reeling at the base of those stairs, little buzzing wires of pain stretching all the way up from his stomach to his burning, whirlpool chest: was that what she thought, that he was trying to keep her out, shut her down, that he didn't _want _her hand on his arm or that look in her eyes- for Hyne's sake it was the _only _thing he wanted, why couldn't she _understand _that-

He pulled his hands out of his pockets and his fumbling step forward became an awkward hop that made her smile, for just a moment.

It lit up her whole face and softened his chest and he was right _there_, just hovering on the brink of the confession eating away at him from the inside, if he could just open his mouth and pry loose his tongue then she'd step into his arms with that same little smile, and for just that one eternal freeze-frame moment he'd forget about Seifer Almasy rotting away in a cage and Quistis sobbing over his grave-

"Ellone, I didn't mean to…I just…I can't talk about it right now, you know?" He was ashamed to hear his voice coil up like a rusty old spring, groaning at its snapping point.

She brought her hand up to cup his cheek, letting that smile flicker like a ghost again. "It's ok if you can't. I just want you to know…if you need to…Zell, if you want to talk about _anything_, I'll listen ok?"

Her thumb flicked a short little arc across his tattoo up toward his temple, and he couldn't look away from her eyes. "Uh…yeah, I know. I mean, you've always been there and stuff for us, that's why we all called you 'Sis' and everything because you were like this big sister to us, taking care of all of us and you were _always _there for us no matter what, so I know that you're always going to be here for us, when we need you and I mean you're not really like a sister to me anymore now that you're all grown up and I'm all grown up and you have boobs and I like boobs and oh-"

Oh _shit _what the _hell _was he saying, why did he always let his freaking mouth just run _away _with him-

"Zell." She took his face between both hands now and leaned forward until he could feel the curve of her forehead up against his, soft as silk.

Her face brightened back into that smile again, and it brought out all the green in her eyes. "If you um…" Heat like a sudden scattering of sunset across her cheeks climbed up from her neck. "…if you want you can touch them. Me. I mean, you can…I'd like you to-"

"Whoa!" He stumbled back out of her hands and clipped a chair behind him, almost upending himself over the back of it. "What did you just say?"

She crossed her arms and looked away with one palm pressed tightly up against the side of her nose, like she could hide the flush in her cheeks with just that profile shot of her hand, banded white. "I want to-" She dropped her hand to clench it at her throat, and he slowly took a step toward her, his heart a turbocharged thunder against his ribs.

He wanted to see her naked-

He cut that train of thought off before it could slip out between his lips, and he took another step forward with his hands cautiously out in front of him like she was a wild animal he had to approach carefully, or risk losing an arm. "You uh, you didn't…you didn't say what I thought you said 'cause-"

"Zell, I need to know how you feel about me- I'm…I'm just so _confused_, and sometimes it seems like you feel the same way about me and then you tell me what a good friend I am and pat me on the head and…I don't _want _to keep feeling like this all the time, like if I hold on for just a little while longer, if I just _wait_, you'll come around…please just be honest with me. I just…" She hissed out a breath between her teeth, and her shoulders formed a square of rigidly-controlled resolve. "I want to know if you- if I'm just a friend to you, if I'll always be 'Sis,' or if you…" She wrinkled up her nose like she was trying not to cry, and he felt like an _ass_, he was such a stupid _idiot_-

_Say it say it SAY IT YOU MORON_-

He couldn't tell if the voice in his head was his own, or Seifer's.

"Ellone-"

And you know, in the end he couldn't choke it out after all- it hung up in his throat and caught on his tongue and she looked away with that little crinkled lip pucker and shining corner-wrinkled eyes and he'd made her _cry _ah _shit_ he was an asshole, he was a stupid _dick _just like Almasy, _worse _than Almasy, because everyone expected him to be a jerk anyway-

"Don't cry," he whispered, the fist in his throat squeezing the plea down to just a thin ragged murmur of an entreaty, and one last step brought him close enough to stretch a hand out toward her cheek.

"I'm sorry," she sniffed, wiping her eyes. "I'm sorry; I didn't mean to. It's ok- please don't feel bad. It's not your fault if I got the wrong idea."

"Ellone-" He had both of her hands in his without understanding how they'd gotten there, and he tightened his fingers around hers like he could squeeze comprehension into them, like he could make her understand everything going on inside of him without having to say anything, because maybe she didn't feel exactly the same way after all- maybe for her it was just a fleeting crush she'd be over in a day a week a month, but he loved her, he _loved _her, he'd loved her for a year now, and so long as she didn't know he could still go on hoping and praying and pretending, but now, in this moment that kept stretching on and on between them she could shatter all of that, she could stomp all over him, she could rip out his _heart _and feed it back to him-

She gave him a smile that wobbled around the edges. "You don't have to say anything."

"No, I-" He licked his lips. "Ellone, I- you're not…you're not…I don't-"

Dammit, he just kept _tripping _over himself- he was never gonna' say it, he didn't even know _how _to say it-

He slid his hands down her wrists to her waist and suddenly her lips crashed down on hers or his smashed up against hers, and he staggered backward with her in his arms and shit oh _shit_- he could feel her breasts up against his chest and her hips tight to his and now he could feel his pants going snug around the crotch and _shit shit shit_ he really hoped she didn't notice that-

She pushed her hands up his chest and brought them to a stop against his nipples and if he didn't know if it was on purpose or just coincidental but it didn't matter because certain parts of him couldn't distinguish between the two anyway, and now he tried to pull away, like his thing might scare her off or something if she noticed it, like she wasn't already aware he had one or something-

"It's ok," she whispered, kissing the corner of his mouth and looping both arms around his neck. "You can touch me, Zell."

"Ok," he breathed, pulling one hand from the curve of her hip to slip it up the soft slant of her stomach to the underside of one breast; he let his thumb trail a slow exploratory curve across it, and leaned his forehead up against hers. "Are you…are you sure?"

"I want something _good _to happen to us in the middle of all this- you go out and you fight and I sit at home or at Garden worrying that maybe you're not coming back and one day you might not, and I-" Her measured inhalation snagged like a hiccup in her throat. "I'm so _afraid _that's what's going to happen-"

"It's not, I promise."

"You can't promise something like that."

He cracked his lips open around a toothy grin that brought a smile to her face through all the layers of pale-worn grief in her eyes. "I'm too fast for all those stupid Galbadians, Ellone, I promise."

"You better be." Her face was very red now as she looked away from him. "Would you…take me upstairs? Please? I want to…"

His hand on her hip tightened sweatily, the one beneath her breast going rigid. "You wanna' have sex?"

"No! I just…I mean…let's just see what happens-"

From the corner of one eye Zell watched Freeloader lift his head with an almost ponderous majesty, both eyes blinking sleepily.

He let out a loud bark that jumped them both apart.

For a moment all they could do was stand there staring at one another, her face still bright crimson and his hands shaking along his sides, and then suddenly she brought one hand up to her mouth to smother the giggles that began to vibrate her shoulders with the force of them. "He's protecting your virtue."

Stupid mutt. He'd hung onto his virtue long enough as it was- he just wanted to see some boobie, you know?

Her face abruptly crumpled as he watched her, and she flattened that fist-curled palm into a little white-knuckled shield across her nose, hunching forward at the waist.

A finger-thick trickle of ice like a claw raked his spine, and he closed the space between them to rest both hands lightly against her shoulders, closing them spastically as she began to cough.

"Ellone?"

* * *

><p>His voice is doing it again: something creeps inside of it and pulls it apart at the seams and then rolls it around for good measure, until it is shredded or dirty or rotting or rusting, whatever it is that makes it sound like this-<p>

He takes a deep breath and folds her carefully into his arms, and he wants her to know that whatever this is, whatever is happening to her, whatever will become of her-

He is not going to leave. He is going to be right here beside her the whole time even if it hurts, even if watching her unravel pulls him apart as well because this is just what you _do_, when you love someone.

There is a soft sad little smile around the corners of her lips when she pulls away, and terror is a little rat in his guts, chewing its way out from the inside.

This is what her smile tells him:

She is not going to make it. Something strange and unfixable and fatal is going on inside of her, and inch by fractional inch, it is sliding her away from him. One day she will be nothing but another white-shining headstone in the sand beside Selphie, presided over by solemn little orphan children who lay flowers on her grave, and there is going to be nothing he can do about it, nothing he can punch or kick or backfist to stop it all-

He has to look away as he wipes the blood from her nose and the stray tear he catches with his thumb, and at his feet Freeloader curls up with a little mournful whine that makes him want to cry, that curls her more snugly against his chest and presses his face down tight against her hair, and he-

He's not going to _let _this happen, _fuck _this meek acceptance of fate, it's not what he's been _trained _for, it's not what he _believes _in-

He can't.

He _just can't_- don't leave him Ellone _everyone _is leaving him and he is so afraid of being alone-

"I love you," she whispers into his chest, and his stomach and his heart tighten like a hand around his throat and he can only stand here blinking down at the top of her head, he can only _stand here _like the fumbling foot-swallowing moron he is-

But he just can't say it, you know? It feels like she is saying good-bye, and he doesn't _want _to say good-bye, not now, not when she has finally given him this glimmer of hope, he-

He blinks away tears and shifts his feet and when she looks up at him with her eyes shining and her lips slightly parted he has a smile for her; he can feel it stretch his face like plastic, artificially brittle along the edges but it's the only thing he's got for her, and it has to be enough- _it has to be enough _because he's just a guy who thinks with his fists and can't spell worth shit and doesn't deserve her anyway, but he doesn't want her to leave him please _Hyne _don't let her leave him-

She touches his jaw and kisses the little indentation between his collarbones and she is waiting for him to say it back: he sees it in her eyes and feels it in the shaking of her fingers, and for a long, long time that becomes soundless white noise forever, he can't say anything.

If he doesn't she is going to cry again. Maybe not in front of him, but later, alone, back at Garden or her place at the Palace when he is not there to see- she will empty out all her grief into a pillow or a sympathetic shoulder, and it will be his fault, _completely _his fault, and the realization thumps him like a gut blow.

"Ellone-"

The shine in her eyes has gone dull, now.

"I wanna' be with you for the rest of my life," he blurts out awkwardly, both his hands knotting into fists at her back. "I mean, I'm not, like, proposing or something- that would be kinda' soon so don't freak out or something- but I- I've liked you for a long time and I don't know where it came from or how it started but it's not going away and I don't think it's ever going away, and now you're just standing here telling me you feel the same way…but it feels like you're telling me because you think you're gonna' die soon or something, you know? And I don't…I don't- Ellone, I _can't_-"

"Shh," she says, cupping his face between her hands. "I said it because I wanted you to know, Zell. I'm not going to die, at least not for a very long time, ok?"

She is lying to him.

He doesn't need to watch her begin coughing again to realize this.

He helps her to the couch with Freeloader circling anxiously at their legs, and when the voice that is not hers begins to jumble up at her lips in one long reptilian hiss he cannot quite make out- _weren't there some children i think there were some children i was supposed to kill maybe i did kill them hee hee i think i did_- he sits with his arms around her shoulders and her head in his lap, stroking her hair.

He stares into the direct center of the lamp on the end table to his right, so he can pretend it is the light causing this film of moisture across his vision.

* * *

><p>She spent a very long time sifting through old e-mails and saved instant message conversations that night.<p>

There were a lot of them, spanning months- he'd spent most of the war writing to her whenever he could get his hands on any sort of technology, mostly requests for topless photos and other typically lewd demands she had clicked out of with an eye roll and a shake of her head.

But there were others, interspersed throughout those instructions suggesting how she should pose and what she should wear- not much, usually- little nagging reminders of a romantic young boy with a head full of dragons and princesses and the heroes who saved them, and it was these she lingered over now, the coffee at her elbow going cold.

When he was sure he would not get caught out by his fellow comrades, he sent her copies of poems he had saved and carried with him into the field, because they reminded him of her.

It had taken a new outfit and several very inventive positions to get that one out of him, and sometimes at night when she could not sleep, wondering if he was going to come home to her this time, she pictured his face the way it had looked that night: hazily half-lidded and languidly smiling, his fingers flickering smooth erratic strokes up her bare ribcage.

When she asked him where he got the poems he sent to her, he stretched and rolled over and did not say anything for a long time.

"I copied some of them out of that stupid book. Because they…ah shit, this is gay. Because they reminded me of the way you smiled, reading it. And…I don't know, sometimes I just fucking need that when I'm out there."

It still made her smile, even now.

She clicked into an old messenger window that expanded like the pages of a book folding open across her monitor.

**3977SA: come on. come downstairs, instructor. got a surprise for you.**

** quistis_trepe_14: The last time you said that, I walked into the library to find Zell scrambling around with no pants on, yelling something about a terrorist network operating on the Centran coast dealing exclusively in the hot dog black market. I still, to this day, do not understand what happened to his pants. And then I received a very explicit picture of certain parts of your anatomy in my e-mail, which the librarian happened to catch you uploading to one of the network terminals.**

** 3877SA: it's not my fault that fucktard messed everything up.**

** quistis_trepe_14: What, exactly, pray tell, Seifer, did he 'mess up?' I fail to see how Zell running around in his underwear interfered with your master plan of abusing your computer privileges to send me pictures of your genitalia. **

**3877SA: that's not what i was going to show you. i got bored waiting around for you to show up. **

** quistis_trepe_14: …and so your first thought was to slip your phone down your pants and begin snapping away?**

** 3877SA: i'm a man. when our minds wander, they usually end up somewhere in the general vicinity of the penis. well, not in the general vicinity. they just end up at the penis. our own, i mean. **

** quistis_trepe_14: I'm glad you clarified that.**

** 3877SA: har har, instructor. you coming downstairs, or what?**

** quistis_trepe_14: I don't think so. I have a lot of work I'm supposed to be finishing up- I shouldn't even be talking to you right now. It's amazing, the amount of paperwork a war generates. Maybe later, when I can get away for a moment. **

** 3877SA: fine, but if you're not going to come downstairs right now, you might as well talk dirty to me. **

** quistis_trepe_14: We've been over this before. I am not engaging in cyber sex with you. Period.**

** 3877SA: cyber head? **

** quistis_trepe_14: NO.**

** 3877SA: i promise i'll return the favor.**

** quistis_trepe_14: NO. **

** 3877SA: then at least send me a picture of your tits. i miss them. last night i woke up in a tent with fucking dincht plastered up against me like we were prison butt buddies or something. he got fucking drool all over the front of my shirt. did you know he's a nasty little fucking groper in his sleep?**

** quistis_trepe_14: I generally avoid sleeping anywhere near him; Irvine tells me he's prone to sleepwalking naked. **

** 3877SA: so about this whole you talking about sucking my dick…**

** quistis_trepe_14: *Sigh* It's not going to happen, Seifer.**

** 3877SA: fine. but let's say you just happened to walk away from your computer for a second, and some naughty co-ed sat down in your place when you weren't paying attention and **_**she **_**sent me pictures of her tits- wouldn't you be pissed she beat you to the punch? what if i liked her tits better than yours?**

**quistis_trepe_14: I'm in my office, the door is locked, and most of Garden is asleep right now. And you wouldn't like them better.**

**3877SA: wow, instructor, little cocky, are we? **

**quistis_trepe_14: You wouldn't like them better, because if I caught you doing so, I'd take Save the Queen to certain parts of your anatomy you have become particularly emotionally attached to.**

**3877SA: you know when you get jealous it fucking turns me on?**

**quistis_trepe_14: If I bend over in front of you wearing grungy old sweatpants it turns you on.**

**3877SA: i'm 22.**

**quistis_trepe_14: That's not an acceptable excuse for breaking the headboard on my bed.**

**3877SA: you kinda helped with that one, if you remember. besides, did you see the look on pubes' face when you had to requisition a new bed? that was the highlight of my whole fucking life.**

**quistis_trepe_14: You still didn't need to describe to him, in detail, how it happened. **

**3877SA: tch. you kidding me, trepe? what's the point in fucking the hottest chick in garden if you can't go around and brag about it?**

** quistis_trepe_14: You could keep it **_**private**_**, the way it should be. It's between us, Seifer, not everyone you've ever talked to for all of two seconds.**

** 3877SA: between us? so you didn't tell ellone that losing your virginity to me was the best decision you ever made?**

** quistis_trepe_14: That is **_**not **_**what I said. **

** 3877SA: so what you're saying is you did tell her about it.**

** quistis_trepe_14: All right…fine. I may have mentioned a couple of things to her, once or twice. I am a woman and entitled to talk about this sort of thing with my female friends, Seifer. **

** 3877SA: but if i go around bragging in the locker room i'm an asshole?**

** quistis_trepe_14: It's different.**

** 3877SA: how the fuck is it different?**

** quistis_trepe_14: It's different because I said so, and I am in control over whether you have anything to brag about in the locker room.**

** 3877SA: you're not going to withhold.**

** quistis_trepe_14: I'm the woman, Seifer. That is my right.**

** 3877SA: last time you decided i was going to go a month without it as punishment for replacing some of wuss' poetry with my own and hanging it on ellone's bedroom door you jumped me after three days.**

** quistis_trepe_14: What you did was mean.**

** 3877SA: no, instructor, it was funny. and my point still stands: you want my dick. so get off your fuckin ass and come get it.**

** quistis_trepe_14: I told you I have work to finish. I'll see you later.**

** 3877SA: fine. but i'm gonna sit here and play with myself until you get here, so say something porny to help me out. **

** 3877SA: what are you wearing right now? tell me it's your uniform skirt.**

** 3877SA: and nothing else. and you're not wearing panties underneath it. and you're sprawled out on top of your desk, touching yourself. **

** 3877SA: while spanking yourself with your whip.**

** quistis_trepe_14: You have a…fertile imagination. I'm sorry to disappoint you, but while I am wearing my uniform, all parts of it are very firmly in place. **

** 3877SA: here's what i got out of all that: fertile, parts, and firmly. **

** quistis_trepe_14: You're impossible. **

** 3877SA: come on, instructor; let's just be done with all this foreplay, and you come sit on my face and let me play with your tits for a while.**

** quistis_trepe_14: What happened to 'it's good to be home, I missed you' as a greeting? **

** 3877SA: playing with your tits is my version of that. i mean it, quistis. put your fucking pen down and come see me. i haven't seen you in two months.**

** quistis_trepe_14: Are you trying to tell me, in your own crude way, that you missed me?**

** 3877SA: i missed parts of you.**

** quistis_trepe_14: Charming.**

** 3877SA: what parts of me did **_**you **_**miss, instructor? be very specific.**

** quistis_trepe_14: I certainly didn't miss your mouth.**

** 3877SA: you don't mean that. think of all the stuff it's done to you.**

** quistis_trepe_14: I am thinking more of all the stuff it's said, and how many times it's nearly provoked me to violence against its owner. **

** quistis_trepe_14: How about this. I'll come downstairs if you can quote The Highwayman from memory.**

** 3877SA: all of it? it's fucking long.**

** quistis_trepe_14: Just the part after the highwayman asks for a kiss from the landlord's daughter. When she loosens her hair.**

** 3877SA: are you fucking kidding me?**

** quistis_trepe_14: You just sent me several verses of it. It shouldn't be too long gone from your memory.**

** 3877SA: fuck. fine.**

** 3877SA: he rose upright in the stirrups; he scarce could reach her hand, but she loosened her hair i' the casement! his face burnt like a brand. as the black cascade of perfume came tumbling over his breast; and he kissed its waves in the moonlight, oh sweet black waves in the moonlight! then he tugged at his rein in the moonlight, and galloped away to the west.**

** 3877SA: good enough?**

** quistis_trepe_14: I'm impressed.**

** 3877SA: and the fucking point of that was…?**

** quistis_trepe_14: I just find it amusing to have Seifer Almasy of all people quoting me poetry. I wonder what those new cadets you spent so many hours tormenting as head of the Disciplinarian Committee would think about all this?**

** 3877SA: they wouldn't think anything, because if they ever found out i'd rip their heads off and flush them all down wuss' toilet, as payback for all the times he's clogged mine. **

** 3877SA: you promised, instructor. i kept up my end of the deal. meet me in your room. but take off your panties first. and your bra.**

** quistis_trepe_14: That wasn't part of the deal.**

** 3877SA: do it anyway. i wore something special for you tonight. i'll give you a hint- it's long and gray and it's shaped like an elephant trunk thong…**

** quistis_trepe_14: You are horrible at giving hints. **

** quistis_trepe_14: And if that's what I discover when I take off your pants, I'm afraid our relationship is over.**

** 3877SA: fine, i didn't wear the trunk thong, but i figured since my dick is almost the same size as an elephant trunk it would be redundant.**

** 3877SA: i'll see you in five, instructor. i'm going to do to you what that highwayman never had time to do to the landlord's daughter. **

* * *

><p>When she is done reading, she is not sure if she is laughing or crying.<p>

* * *

><p>She let herself into his office without knocking, the thud of the door rebounding off the wall pulling his head up from its chin-cupped slump. "I want you to put me into contact with whoever you have on the inside in Galbadia."<p>

His brow furrowed just slightly. "What are you talking about?"

She did not have time for this sort of crap. "Someone gave up Daar's location and passed it along to you. I need contact information."

"Quistis-"

"I'm not leaving him there, Squall." The frost that encapsulated her voice flinched him back against his chair just slightly, and now he could not quite look at her, focusing instead on the white-smeared knot of his hands on the desk in front of him.

"He knew what he was getting into when he went after Daar. We can't risk-"

"We're already at war with Galbadia. I hardly doubt rescuing one ex-revolutionary is going to add much to their enmity toward us."

"I don't have the SeeDs to spare for a-"

"I'll take care of it." Her voice did not warm. "I'm not asking permission, Squall. We can hardly trade Esthar for one man; Galbadia knows that. They're going to execute him. I'm sure they hope to get something smaller out of us within the three week time frame they have given us, but they will kill him- he's too dangerous for them to let him go a second time."

"And if I don't give you any contact information?"

She paused for just a moment to let both eyes tighten fractionally up around the corners. "Then I'll die trying to get him out of there on my own. It doesn't matter whether you give it to me or not- I'm still going after him." She would not leave him alone in a cold lightless box with shadows like his mother, coming for him in the dark.

She'd held him too many times in that dark to turn her back on him now, shivering and sweating and burying his face in her collarbone like he needed a place to hide and she had been custom-fit for the job, and she would _not leave him there_.

She would go straight through Garden's commander if need be, overturn his desk and that hand-carved chair he perched stiffly in now, back him up against the window with her whip around his throat-

She'd been with Seifer for far too long: she was starting to think like him.

She pictured him smiling down at her with leftover hints of boy Seifer in his eyes, combing loose-fluttering pieces of hair back from her face and whispering things he thought she was too deeply asleep to hear, and she decided she did not care.

Somewhere along the way Seifer Almasy had become worth dying for.

* * *

><p>Sometimes there are children in here with her.<p>

They are laughing or screaming- she can't tell anymore because it all twists together, it all bounces and tangles and clots up in one another until it's all one long string of shriekingcryinggiggling why won't it _stop_-

_-rinoa are you all right rinoa-_

"I'm _thinking_."

_-what are you thinking about rinoa tell us what you're thinking about don't keep us out ok we're here to help you rinoa rinoa we just want to _help _you we don't want you to be alone_-

She is thinking about a green-eyed blonde boy holding a girl with glasses and a red-gaping hole where her chest used to be and around them twirl children dangling flaccid meat flops of optic nerve cable that swing like the boy's head, trying to take them all in at once-

_-see rinoa why would you save these children they're monsters _look _at them rinoa they're _monsters_-_

"But the blonde one…he used to be one of us, didn't he?"

_-yes he did rinoa but he betrayed us he betrayed his own _mother _is that the kind of knight you want the kind that's going to use you up and then throw you away when he's done with you that's not what you want rinoa you can't trust him-_

"Squall-"

_-you don't want him either rinoa he put you here remember it's his fault you're here and you're alone with only us to keep you company but remember rinoa we love you we do rinoa so you don't have to worry anymore because we'll never betray you-_

"Maybe…maybe he had a good reason to-"

_-no rinoa none of them had good reasons for what they did they were all just selfish wanting you out of the way for their own reasons they didn't really love you you see none of them not even squall _especially _not squall he's the worst of them all-_

"But he…I think he loved me, didn't he?"

_-no rinoa he never did he only pretended to he only wanted to get what he could out of you and then he put you here when he was done with you like they've done with all of us remember what we told you everyone is always going to be afraid of you everyone will always _hate _you because you're better than them except us rinoa we'll always love you rinoa-_

"Oh."

There is a bonfire flare inside her chest, crisping everything.

"Are you…are you sure no one loves me? What about…I had friends, didn't I? I had friends and _they _loved me, right, even if Squall didn't?"

_-no rinoa they never loved you either they only pretended to because they were too afraid of what you might do to them if you found out the truth they were afraid of your power and greedy they wanted it all to themselves they were all just going to hurt you sooner or later trust us rinoa we're the only ones you can trust now-_

"Oh."

Her voice is a flatly dispassionate hiss in her clogged-up throat, because it is the only way she can keep back the tears.

**A/N: Seifer's little marriage proposal is supposed to be one long squished-together line, to illustrate just how clumsy and jumbled it was, but this site's formatting will not let me do that- it eats most of the line unless I split it up. Also, in their instant message conversation, the poem Seifer is quoting is called The Highwayman by Alfred Noyes. If you can't tell, this is one of the few poems I actually like- I think it made an appearance in Ashes as well, though I can't remember for sure at the moment.**


	13. Interlude Six

_Dear Selphie,_

_Hey Selphie it's Zell again. _

_Today the Spring Festivul Cumitee held a dance and I thought about you. I'm pretty sure we all did, but you know what- it was a good memory, because I remembered how happy you used to be setting up your decurations and dragging Irvine out to dance and dressing Quisty up and trying to set her up with anything with a penis…_

_ We all went to it, even Quisty, and we sat around all night sharing storys about you and I haven't seen Irvine smile that much in a long time. Sinse you died, really. _

_ Ellone came and I dansed with her and I even let Kinneas cut in cause I'm a nice guy like that, and Quisty spent most of the time slapping Seifer's hands away from her ass and refusing to sneak off into one of the corners to make out with him. It got kinda loud after a while- Quisty yelled I'm not touching that here Seifer! at one point and we all laughed and she turned really red and left, so then he had to go chasing after her cause he said if he didn't she knew where he slept and he'd wake up to find her standing over him with a knife to his balls._

_ It was fun, you know? Like…we don't really get the chance to just hang out, be with each other unless we're killing people._

_ Kinda sad, isn't it? I guess I never really thought this was what I sined up for when I first entered Garden; I was just a kid, you know so I didn't really get what it meant to be a soldier- I didn't get that it meant having to kill someone with your bare hands sometimes. I thought it was just gonna' be all about being a hero and doing the right thing and having Ma be proud of me…_

_ I think she is anyway, though._

_ I hope she is. _

_ Ellone kissed me today. Well, just on the cheek when I walked her back to Quisty's dorm room- she stays there a lot when she's here at Garden- but I thought you'd wanna know. We kinda' were having this moment, and then Seifer walked around the corner with Quistis and ruined it cause he's an asshole like that but you know it doesn't matter cause one day I'm gonna tell her how I feel about her. _

_ I think about you and Rinoa a lot and I hope you guys are happy wherever you are. That capsule's supposed to keep Rinoa in hibernation, so it's kinda like she's just taking this big long nap and you know I hope she never wakes up and realizes she's alone…I'd hate that, waking up in the middle of space to find myself all alone and confused and stuff and wondering what I did wrong. _

_ I always wonder where you went too. I mean, is there really a heven and stuff like that? What's it like? _

_ Ma always told me there was and that she was gonna be watching over me from it one day so I didn't have to worry or be sad when the time came. She told me that when I was about nine, cause I asked her if she was gonna go away like my first parents did. She said everyone had to go away eventually but they didn't _really _leave, not all the way, you know? _

_ She said you all go somewhere, and it's the best place you could ever imagine and you get to see all the people you love whenever you want to and…_

_ Well, I just hope that's really true. I hope you're watching over us all and that you don't feel alone or anything and that you're gonna wait around for Irvine to come be with you one day._

_ Well, uh, I hope you're not always watching us because that would be kinda creepy like if I was going to the bathroom or something or like…watching stuff on my computer or when I'm in the shower so it's ok if you're out there watching over us, just don't watch _all _the time, ok, Selphie? _

_ Love you._

_ Love,_

_ Zell_


	14. Chapter Seven

**A/N: Dee, I swear to God every time you review, I need to grease up my head before fitting it through doorways. But seriously, thank you for being such an enthusiastic supporter. Mischka, glad to see you back; hope school is going well, but you know, shame on you for letting it distract you from Seiftis. ;) Sulou, I'm glad I managed to pull off Seifer's squishier side without completely fucking it up. Everyone else, I think I got you in PM, but if not, feel free to cyber punch me for forgetting to acknowledge you. **

**Ok, so because I am irresponsible and keep burrowing deeper and deeper into fanfiction instead of writing original things that might possibly scrape some funds into my pathetic bank account, I'm already sort of planning out my next fic for when I am finished with this one. (I already have a Works document filling up with ideas; no joke.) Here is the deal: I have always kind of wanted to do a Final Fantasy novelization, because something on that epic of a scope appeals to my rambly nature. However, I know me, and I'd get bored just a few pages in, trying to follow some script to some plot I already know; the whole point of fanfiction is to borrow a world and characters you love and then play with them however the hell you want to. Not to mention, at least one completed FF 8 novelization exists, and I'm sure it's possible there is at least another few or so out there that I am not aware of. I don't want to re-tread the same old territory, nor do I want to really do another FF 8 sequel right now after this one. I want to play in some new territory. So, here is my basic idea: shortly after Seifer, Quistis, Zell and Squall all end up at B. Garden, Cid passes away after suffering a heart attack. Because of this, and the lack of willing replacements, the government defunds B. Garden, and all SeeDs-in-training are split between Trabia and Galbadia Garden. The orphanage gang all ends up at G. Garden. (Selphie will transfer over from Trabia right at the beginning of the story, just as she does in the game, only she ends up at Galbadia Garden this time.) My thought is, how would this single event change things so much? No Cid, no foster father watching over them to ensure they fulfill their role as 'fated children'. Edea goes all crazycakes, except this time there is no one to plot her assassination, no deal between B. Garden and G. Garden to take care of the problem, etc. etc. I will be taking part of the most recent one-shot I posted here and expanding upon it, but the two stories will have nothing to do with one another, so it will not be imperative to read that one. I simply wanted more room to explore a plot point. Also, I'm going to incorporate some elements from the original fic I was working on before Ashes to Dust came along. Basically, there will be a new continent, possibly two, depending upon how much I intend to steal from that story. (I have this thing with plagiarizing myself.) No original characters or anything like that, and while this is obviously going to be AU, it's not going to be unrecognizable- there will still be SeeDs and sorceresses, etc. (And Seifer/Quistis, obviously.) No one's role will change much, if at all, but it will turn out a lot different from the original storyline, obviously; it is basically how I think the game could have gone and how differently it could have turned out with just a few tweaks to the plot. My question is this: does this sound remotely interesting to anyone? The Seiftis community seems to have really taken a hit audience-wise lately, so I'm a little unsure as to my posting history after I finish up this fic. Thoughts are welcome. Also, my apologies for this hideously long note. **

**Chapter Seven**

D-District Prison

Dingo Desert

5 Days Later

The shadows in here are out to get him.

Paint-dripping slithers down the walls that smell like mold and sex and old blood in the dark-

He's always known his mother left him not quite sane: he is all scrambled up inside like she stuck her arm in him up to the fucking elbow, and he's never quite figured out how to put everything back together again. So when these shadows bend and ooze and whisper threats to him from the walls, he gets that it's not really happening, that he is all alone in here with just the faint musical clink of his restraints, rattling together-

But he still can't sleep.

His days blur together into long red-stained smears of beatings that go on and on, of teeth-chatter pulsations like thudding jackhammer heartbeats of sidewalk construction, except his jaw's the sidewalk, and the jackhammer is that fucking drill.

They like the drill.

One day, they bore through a couple of his teeth into the gum below; the next, they're back to work on that knee.

The day after that, they move him from his cell.

His destination's a low dirty box of a room, smaller than his cell, furnished only by a slender little strip through the middle, full of shit-reeking water up to his chest.

They cram him into a spike-bristling cage they lower into the middle of it, so fucking scrawny from corner to corner they can barely wedge him inside, and leave him there for three days.

When they sit down with him afterward to ask their questions again, he can't conjure up enough spit to arc a nice little wad of it into the face of the shitheel interrogating him- mouth's too dry for that, because they give him just barely enough water to keep him alive.

He's got enough blood in there to drown the fuckers, though.

He gets a drill to the other knee afterward, but that's ok: they'll heal him like they always do, so it's not like he's gotta' worry about being permanently crippled, right?

He doesn't have much longer to worry about anything.

* * *

><p>"This thing smells."<p>

"Shut up and just put the damn thing on."

"It's too small."

"That's 'cause your mouth is too big."

"Hey, shut up!"

"Both of you, be quiet."

"Well, he started it. Whine, whine, whine, that's all he's done since we got here. Tired of listening to him. Maybe we oughta' stick him in one of these cells to wait until we've got you-know-who."

"_Quiet_. Put your helmet on, quickly."

"Yes, ma'am."

"Nika Lauglin, I.D. #85760100. We have clearance for the isolation unit. I was told prisoner #357791203 is in need of more guards?"

"He's been giving us some trouble, yes. I.D.?"

"Here you go, sir."

"And mine!"

"Looks good. You're cleared. Gotta' run your I.D. every time you pass through this door here, and entering any cells is against the rules unless you've been cleared first-"

"We have clearance to interact with prisoner #357791203...Seifer Almasy, I believe? The Balamb SeeD? We're on clean-up duty."

"Yep, that's him. Good luck; be careful when you heal him. He's subdued enough with a couple of broken ribs and a few drill holes through his legs, but when he's got a couple of Curas in him he's a mean motherfucker. Big guy, too. And the shit you hear about those SeeDs isn't an exaggeration; knows what he's doing. He broke Lana's arm the other day and killed Tom- turned that drill right around on him and put it right through his neck."

"We'll certainly be careful, sir."

"Can't wait to get rid of him; just sixteen days left to go, eh?"

"Yes, it will certainly be a relief; he's one of Balamb's best soldiers."

"'Drill holes through his legs'? What the hell they been doin' to the guy?"

"Quiet. He might still be able to hear us."

"Man, I don't like this; how are we supposed to get him out of here when he's been getting the shit beat out of him everyday?"

"Keep your voice down, _Eugene_."

"Why'd you guys have to stick me with the stupid name?"

"Because Eugene Crotch was the closest guy on the list to match you physically- not easy to get a uniform that size, you know."

"Eugene _Koch_, asshole!"

"_Quiet_. They'll want him coherent so they can attempt to extract information on Garden from him, which means they must be healing him after every…session. We just need to make sure he's been completely healed before his execution."

"So he's gotta' put up with sixteen more days of this shit?"

"There's no way for the three of us to get him out of this prison by ourselves- there's too much security. We need to wait until they bring him outside. I'm hardly thrilled at the thought of leaving him at their mercy for another couple of weeks, but it's the only way to get all of us out of here alive."

* * *

><p>Shit-<p>

_Shit _everything hurts-

Kaleidescopic wheel of star-sputtering galaxy over his head, that's all the entire fucking world is now-

Something wet and charred and leather-rippled in his mouth- maybe his tongue; he can't tell anymore-

_Ungh_…_hrr_

Is that his fucking throat making those noises- there's no goddamned way- he doesn't _have _a throat anymore- it's been burned away by Fira or Firaga or whatever the hell it was they used on him and he can't-

He can't _move _he can't _breathe _he can't _think_-

There are hands under his head. Got the gloves peeled off them, bare skin to bare skin, sliding around to the back of his neck to support him- the fuck is going on they never take off their gloves, they've got those little poison-junctioned spikes on them they like to backhand him with why would they hell would they take them _off_-

"Uh…shouldn't you be leaving? I mean, with the magic and everything? Dr. Kadowaki said-"

"Just do it."

Wait.

_Wait_.

He _knows that voice_-

"You sure, Qu- uh…Nika?"

"Yes. Hurry up."

The hands tighten underneath his head and he tries to open a gummed-shut eye, just fucking _one _for Hyne's sake, because he _knows _that voice and he thought he was never going to hear it again-

"Shit…_look _at him-"

There are voices all around him that he recognizes, and now he's got one eye cracked into a slit that shows him weak watered-down prison light and a couple blurry helmets, all clustered together above him-

They're little blue-swimming dots of constellations in that star-sputtering galaxy over his head-

One of the voices has gone low and deadly and utterly sincere. "Don't worry, Almasy- we're gonna' get 'em for you, ok?"

"Do it. Curaga- I can't find any broken bones, so use a high level healing spell."

"Ok…but are you gonna'-"

"I'll be fine."

He feels one of the hands come up to brush his cheek, and then there's a nuclear white-out in his head that arches him screaming underneath it-

* * *

><p>He can't touch her when she comes into his cell with food and water and potions- there's a camera up in the corner he hasn't figured out how to disable yet, the only spot of color in this whole fucking monochrome hell.<p>

It's a little eye blinking down at him, watching everything he does like those fucking shadows slinking down off the walls to wrap him like nooses in the dark.

One day he's going to take it out, and when it's gone he's going to throw her down and fuck her, knot his hand up in her hair and breathe her name into her neck until she's screaming his against one naked scar-notched shoulder-

He can't do that, of course- it'd ruin whatever crazy shit it is she's cooked up with those two assholes, but it's nice to imagine, and picturing her naked keeps his mind off that hulking meat slab of a man that's coming for him later tonight. Quistis Trepe's bare tits used to be a great way to keep himself awake during her classes too; all those reprimands he got for spacing off during a lecture usually interrupted fantasies of those tits draped across that meticulously-organized desk, one hand down her skirt and the other beckoning a little come-hither finger flick toward him.

Sometimes he made it all the way to fucking her from behind, his cheek against her back and one hand all tangled up in hers on top of that slick little clit before she snapped him back to a reality full of a couple dozen staring assholes and a hard-on he had to keep carefully tucked underneath his desk.

Cid Kramer was a cruel fucking asshole, putting someone like Quistis Trepe in charge of a class full of testosterone-fueled idiots just coming into their hormones. In a skirt and a pair of fuck-me librarian glasses, no less.

Once, that hulking meat slab of a man enters his cell before she leaves.

He can see her thinking about what she's going to do in the fleeting back-and-forth flickers of both eyes behind that visored slit in her helmet, and he stands up with his cuffed hands jingling in front of him and his wolf-gleaming fuck-you smirk on his face and flips his shit. "Get that stupid bitch out of here; get her out of here right fucking _now_-"

She gets escorted unceremoniously from his cell, even though he's not entitled to any demands as a prisoner: it's enough of a pain in the ass to subdue him as it is without him going batshit over some low-ranking soldier who's made it far enough up the shit list to have to bring the renowned Seifer Almasy his meals.

And there's the little matter of this colossal fucking asshole circling him now, who's made it a point of honor to subdue Seifer Almasy all on his own. Wouldn't want some scrawny little bitch of a woman getting in the way.

"Why don't you take my cuffs off, if you really want a fair fight?"

His answer is a fist to the gut that lifts him up onto his toes and sprays blood from his tongue where his teeth close around it like a fucking hammer coming down. The asshole's _fast _for someone so goddamned huge- he always knows how these little skirmishes are going to end, but he goes through the motions anyway, because there's always that one tiny sliver of a chance he'll get the drop on the fucking bastard one day, and he's not passing up a single opportunity to send the fucker screaming to his grave with imprints of Seifer's teeth in his throat-

His head bounces off the corner of the bed, and the blankly monochromatic cell smears red all around him.

* * *

><p>She leans up against the wall beside his cell with her forehead to cool age-pitted steel, and every time there is a muffled flesh-thunk of a blow from the room on the other side, she flinches back against the dented arch of her headpiece with one hand to her throat.<p>

When he starts to scream she has to walk away, blinking aside tears.

* * *

><p>Time is all just one big fucking blur in this place, but he estimates he's been here almost a week and a half or so when he decides he can't fucking take it anymore.<p>

She's fucking _here_, goddammit, and he can't even fucking _talk _to her-

He is lying on his bed trying to concentrate on the ceiling when her shadow looms over him like a fucking monolith, bearing potions; it means Dincht or Kinneas can't make it today and he's got her all to himself, and he strikes out with one hand like a snake uncoiling and gets all five fingers around that slender little wrist, tight as the shackles on his own.

"Can I help you?" she asks coolly.

Don't _talk _to him like that, for fuck's sake, not the way everyone else in this shitty place talks to him, like she doesn't love him anymore and he's really all alone because he's fucking _afraid_, all right? He was ok with dying until it meant not getting to see her anymore, but now he can roll the fear around in his fucking _mouth _it's so tangible, and the walls here remind him of his mother and if she and Dincht and Kinneas can't save his ass this is going to be his world forever, doesn't she _get that_?

He pictures death as something like Time Compression, a long endless stumble through gray smog that walls him off from everyone and everything he's ever known, from _her_, and it scares the shit out of him more than that drill-bit hum he hears in his dreams now-

An eyeblink brings her half upright out of his grip, and in his socket his shoulder gives a dying animal squeal that shoots streaks of meteor tail across his eyes, but it doesn't matter, it doesn't _matter _because he's got his hand around her wrist like a vise again and a sharp jerk brings her down to eye level where he can reach her lips-

And you better fucking _believe _he's never kissed anyone this thoroughly before, this fast-

She slaps him hard enough to make it look real but not hard enough to hurt him much, and he knows she has to do it because that fucking camera is still watching, but it still curdles in his chest and shoots little winter-bleeding fingers through his whole goddamned chest, and he flops over on his bed to put his back between her and and this pain in his heart.

He squeezes his eyes shut so he can't watch her leave.

* * *

><p>She is balancing a plain smooth-sanded metal tray in one hand and a pitcher of water in the other when she walks into his cell five days before he is to be executed at the hands of D-District's firing squad.<p>

The hand that snakes around her mouth half a second after the door slides shut behind her startles the pitcher from her fingers to bounce hollowly against the floor, spraying water.

There is an arm tight around her throat and a hard chest at her back, and she automatically forces her chin down to alleviate the pressure on her windpipe and arches her back to bring the food tray through a smoothly-executed wind-up that will break at least the nose of her attacker-

The arm twitches against her neck and she can feel a nimble half-twist of a dodge, going on behind her-

"It's me, goddammit! Who the fuck else would it be, Trepe?" His voice is nothing more than a puff of air in her ear, but she raises hers to cover it anyway.

"Get off me!"

"Shh! Shut up! You want the assholes in the hallway to hear you? I disabled the camera. There's no surveillance in the room right now; they probably won't notice for a little while. They've got so many people going in and out of here that whatever fatass they've stuck with camera duty probably barely even pays attention anymore."

She regains her voice in one shivery little inhalation that loosens his arm around her just slightly. "Why did you do that? They'll just torture you, Seifer."

"They're going to do that anyway. Why the hell did you almost break my face with that fucking thing?"

"You surprised a trained mercenary- what did you expect?" she replies dryly. "Why did you disable the camera?"

"So I could talk to you." He presses his face into the side of her neck, and kisses it through the layer of fabric separating her armor from her throat. She tenses like he has just pulled a knife on her, and reaches both hands up to peel away his arm.

"Stop it."

"No." He has his other arm around her waist now, pulling her back against him hard enough that she can hear the points of his hip bones thud up against her armor, and now struggling is pointless: he's been healed recently and this arm holding her has the strength of countless hours upon hours of gym training sessions and bodyweight exercises behind it, and if she is being honest with herself, she doesn't want him to move it anyway.

"Seifer-"

He cups the side of her head in one palm and kisses her neck again, leaving his face there, and then with a long smooth yank of that hand he unmasks her, throwing her helmet down onto the floor at their feet.

"_Seifer_-"

"What are you doing with those two idiots?" he asks in between kissing her jaw line and the burn-scar on her cheek. "Kinneas has been out of the infirmary for, what, a fucking week? What the hell is he doing here?"

"Seifer, stop it."

"Piss off, Instructor. What's the plan?"

The chain on his handcuff swings a short arc up against her shoulder, clanking against the armor she wears. "What happened to your handcuffs?"

"I've been trying to snap the fuckers on one of the bed legs- finally managed to do it a couple of hours ago. I smashed the camera with part of the chain."

"And what good is that going to do you? Seifer, I know this is a lot to ask considering how you got yourself in here in the first place, but please don't do anything stupid. Things are…in motion. We have a plan."

"So don't fuck it up, that's what you're telling me?"

"Essentially, yes."

He is still kissing every part of her face and throat he can reach, and it is distracting; when his arm slackens she uses the opportunity to lever it up and over the top of her head, and spins around to face him. "Are you listening to me?"

He slants his head and one hip back against the wall and crosses both arms over his chest, and now there is a smile on his lips that doesn't quite reach his eyes.

She sighs and pinches the bridge of her nose. "Don't look at me like that."

"Like what?"

"Like I just took away your favorite toy. I need you to _cooperate_, Seifer, for once in your life." There is something naked and squirming in her voice, and she watches the hardened slits of his eyes go soft around the edges and his hands slide halfway out of their elbow-tucked positions like his subconscious is doing all the work for him now and it wants him to hold her. "Please?" she whispers. "I just want to get you out of here _alive_, all right? Don't ruin it."

He closes his eyes as he looks away. "How long do I have left?"

"Less than a week. Five days." She lowers her voice even more. "Galbadia is executing you by firing squad- I'm working to get the three of us put on it. Standard procedure calls for only five sharpshooters; we can easily overpower the other two."

"And what about all the guards standing around?"

"We'll have the element of surprise on our side. It's the best chance to get you out of here, Seifer, when they've got you out in the open and not locked up in here; I can't get you out right now without arousing suspicions."

"And if all of them just open fire on you all at once and hose all fucking three of you down?"

"Irvine is confident he can get off enough shots to disable the majority of them before they're even sure what's happening. You'll need to be ready to move the second we turn on them."

"Standard procedure also calls for me to be tied down to a fucking chair while you all draw a bead on my ass."

"We'll make sure the ropes are loose."

"And if you fucking die?"

"Then I die," she says calmly, and something slides down over his face and lifts away, and now there is only a hard deadpan vacancy where all his feelings used to be. "You didn't really think I was just going to leave you here, did you? All three of us understand the risks. They wanted to come because they are your friends, and you should know why I'm here."

"You shouldn't be," he snaps, looking away. "Quistis, I can't-"

She steps forward against him, cheek to chest, and there is only a silent fractional half second between the automatic backward flinch of his body and his arms coming up around her, so hard she can barely breathe.

She does not mind, because now he has his mouth against hers the way he did three days ago when she had to slap him away, and this time she can allow herself to just hang in his grip, kissing him back, letting her tongue tangle up in his and memorizing the pattern his breath makes against her face and how is she ever supposed to let _go _of this, knowing what is going to happen to him later-

"Take off the uniform," he breathes without breaking contact with her mouth.

"I can't- we don't know when they're coming back-"

"Just the armor." He brings one hand up to begin peeling away at it, kissing his way down to the hollow between her collarbones. "I can be fast."

"What do you mean? Seifer, stop."

* * *

><p>He swallows and presses himself against her and keeps tugging at her armor, shedding it in little <em>clink clink clinks <em>of battle-dented steel hitting the floor.

"Stop- what if someone walks in?"

"If we hear someone coming put your helmet back on real fast. Act like I raped you when they walk in."

"Seifer, do you know what they'll _do _to you if they think you've raped a Galbadian soldier in their own prison?"

"Trust me, Instructor, it can't be worse than the shit they've already done." His hands are shaking as he slides them down to the waistband of her pants and hooks his thumbs between the soft material of her uniform and the softer glide of her bare flesh against his fingers; he goes to his knees in front of her to pull them all the way down, kissing her thigh, leaning his cheek against it to look all the way up the line of her long model-lean leg to her eyes.

"I can't-"

He kisses her thigh again and feels her knee bend slowly against his face, a long smooth joint-fold that brings her down to his level.

Look, he fucking loves her all right? He just wants to show her that before they all get their asses shot off in this cluster fuck of a rescue mission.

"I haven't been laid in weeks, Instructor," he says through a smile, framing her face in his hands this time when he kisses her. "It'll be over in about three seconds." A tug on her waist sprawls her forward against him, and she has to straddle him now to keep her balance, rubbing herself unconsciously up against his dick.

He wraps his arms around her back and just holds her for a moment until she begins to relax, resting his cheek against her breasts.

"_Fast_," she whispers. "I need to leave…right afterward."

He grabs her by the crook of each knee and gets his feet underneath him, rising with both her legs hooked around his waist and one hand fumbling at his zipper. "Undo the belt," he gasps in her ear, backing her into a wall as her palm grazes the hard-on straining at his pants, and when she can't unbuckle it fast enough he does it for her, letting his pants puddle out loosely around his feet.

He's inside her in one thrust. In this position, with her legs up around him like this, she's tight as hell, and he makes good on his promise, hammering in and out of her as fast as he can, sliding his hands around to cup both shoulder blades and protect them from the hard wall at her back, punctuating each short hard gasp that is the only breath he can mange right now with another thrust that rocks their hips together with a sex-slick smack.

She keeps her eyes shut and her cheek pillowed on his shoulder as they fuck.

* * *

><p>She spirals toward the edge with his ear in her teeth and both eyes tightly closed, fisting her hands in his shirt and meeting each thrust with as much force as she can manage with the wall at her back.<p>

There are fireworks swirling together underneath her eyelids, red-tinged white like speckles of heat shimmer-

She's got her eyes squeezed too tight but it doesn't matter, she can't watch his face knowing she might be losing it soon-

His hips slow when she is only seconds away from spilling over into mindless in-the-moment ecstasy that will clench her like a fist around him, and now both of his hands pick her head up by the face to pull it from the crook of his shoulder, dead centering it in front of him. One final slow slide of a thrust pushes him all the way in and now he stops, holding her face between his hands and kissing the tip of her sweaty nose. "Trepe, look at me." He gives her a little shake. "Quistis."

"Seifer, please just hurry," she whispers. "We can't stay like this. They're going to-"

"Look at me."

She pops her eyes open to do as he says, and his mouth crashes down against hers with enough force to scrape their teeth together; she winds her fingers into the hair at the nape of his neck and holds on as tight as she can, until she has to come up for air, just a half second of an inhale that trails off into a moan as he starts to move inside her again.

His hands are a rough frictal shift beneath her shirt, flicking up against her breasts.

He pulls her shirt up far enough to kiss them, and she digs her nails into his back.

* * *

><p>Oh shit, oh <em>shit <em>he's right there-

She clamps down around him and he orgasms so hard the world goes black, for just a moment, and she's saying his name in his ear just the way he always wanted her to, bent over that desk like she doesn't even know what it's doing to him-

He keeps thrusting until they are both shivering and sweat-soaked and his legs are little fucking strands of rubber underneath him, and then he slips his hands around to her ass and slides her off him with a final back-of-the-throat wheeze that's got more than a tinge of winded asthmatic to it.

She pulls his pants back up around his waist and silently buckles his belt for him.

He replaces her whole uniform once piece at a time, kissing all the way up from her ankles to her inner thighs before he slides her pants back on, taking way goddamned longer than he knows he is supposed to, kissing her bare stomach and the sides of her ribs before yanking her shirt down for good, laying her out underneath him on the floor and pinning both hands above her head with his fingers threaded through hers. He takes his time kissing her throat and her chin, all the way up her nose to her forehead and then around to both sides, and now finally it's time for her helmet to go back on but he can't _stand _to pick the fucker up and shut her off from him again like that- he's got to let go of her the second he does that and watch her walk back out that door again, and now there's a moment when he doesn't care what they do to him, he just doesn't want her to fucking _leave _him-

"Seifer." She touches his face with the back of her hand, very gently. "Let go."

"I love you," he blurts out like a fucking moron, and it's not even what he meant to say, somehow it just came fucking ripping out of him like there's a goddamned hand inside of him, uprooting everything-

Her smile is a soft ghost of a thing, just flickering at the corners of her lips. "I know."

There's a boulder in his throat he has to swallow around.

No she doesn't, she'll _never _know, she will never fully fucking understand it because he doesn't even get it himself, how can you fucking burn this hot for one person, this blue-eyed blonde with the stick up her ass and his heart between her teeth-

"Let go," she says again, still gently, and he knows she's talking about more than just his grip on her wrists, but fuck it he doesn't _want _to- he's all alone in here with the shadows and that hulking meat slab of a man and the shrill drill-bit echo of his teeth flaking away-

He lets her up slowly.

When she stands he is still kneeling, and she skims her hands back through the hair at the sides of his head, tugging gently on him until he scrapes his feet up underneath him as well.

Their last kiss is a long poignant thing she lets go on for several minutes, her fingers stroking the unshaved scruff on his cheeks as he grips her by the wrists, holding both hands there.

When she pulls back she has another smile for him, even if it doesn't reach her eyes.

* * *

><p>Galbadian models had nothing on Exeter, which wasn't much of a surprise- he'd labored over upgrades on that thing as carefully as any parent would a sick child- but he was good enough to make do with just about any gun you put in his hand.<p>

Course, didn't mean part of him didn't long for the slickly familiar abrasion of his own rifle in his hand when he patrolled these halls, nodding to assholes he'd just as soon pull the trigger on, keeping his weapon at a tightly-controlled shoulder arms that tugged a little on his biceps. Damn thing wasn't up to full strength yet, after all those weeks of laying around on his ass in the infirmary- none of him was, really, but you didn't need to bench press Snow Lions to shoot accurately. Hell, he'd never been the strongest guy at either Garden- too long and lean and faggy, as one of his instructors had so eloquently put it- but see if anyone dared mention that to his face after they witnessed him center a three inch group at a thousand yards out.

He watched Quistis let herself into Seifer's cell and swept on past without a word, his boots sending little ripples of impact down the steel mesh underneath his feet. Be nice if those two got to say good-bye properly, just in case.

He never did, 'cause sometimes it's just over that fast, and all you're left holdin' is an empty carapace of a thing that used to be someone you loved.

He was gonna' be rooting for them, anyway. He'd just…he'd never seen either of them look so happy as when they were together, you know?

Didn't seem fair for that nasty bitch Fate to try and take that away. Of course, she'd proved just how fair she really was when she took Selphie from him and Rinoa from Squall, but she wasn't getting these two if he had anything to say about it.

One more looping pass brought him to Seifer's cell once more, and he noticed the little green indicator light still lit up on the panel outside his prison, showing there was still a guard inside with him. Maybe they were getting that proper good-bye after all; the walk around the isolation catwalk was a long one, punctuated by frequent stops here and there to check prisoners and catch up on changing shift schedules and cell block gossip, which usually amounted to 'so and so died last night,' or 'man, me an' Bob kicked the shit out of that asshole in thirty-two yesterday; shoulda' seen it!'

He let his face relax in a small smile that abruptly slid off his lips when a sharp twist of his neck brought his head swiveling around toward the teeth-rattling footfalls of something lumbering up the corridor toward him, almost as wide as the entire damn hallway.

_Shit_-

"Mornin', sir. Goin' to check on our SeeD?" He had to crane his neck to see into the bastard's eyes- guy went on forever, for Hyne's sake.

"The surveillance cam in his cell is out."

_Oh shit shit shit shit shit shit shit-_

"Sure it's nothin', probably just a malfunction or somethin'."

"Most likely, but I need to get it up and running again. Almasy is too dangerous to go without any surveillance."

He swung his rifle down to a cradle carry he hoped looked completely casual, just restin' his arms, don't mind him-

"Well, how 'bout I just tag along- not really safe to go in there yourself, is it, sir? Heard he killed another guard just the other day because the guy wasn't paying close enough attention to where Almasy had his hands. Heard he's really fast- guess those SeeDs aren't just rubbing off their own egos, huh, claiming they're the best in the world?"

"I think I can handle it just fine," the man said dryly. He dragged his I.D. card through the slot to the indicator light's left, and the door peeled itself back with a ventilator hiss that smelled like blood and shit and singed meat, same as all the other cells, only this one had a hint of something else under it as well, sweat-musk and something more-

Ah, hell.

He stepped through after the guard and swung a blind hammer-hand of a blow back at the door controls, sealing the cell shut behind him.

Seifer and Quistis sprang apart and Irvine brought his gun up and around in a strike he put all one-hundred-fifty pounds of himself behind, following through like a batter swinging for home; the guy dropped like a Hyne-damned mountain, and he watched Seifer's hands drift slowly back down to curl up at his sides.

"Just couldn't keep it in your pants, could ya, Almasy?"

* * *

><p>When they wonder aloud what they're supposed to do now, he tells them slowly to leave him with a knife and go report that he got his restraints off and killed another guard before they could stop him.<p>

The camera in the hallway outside will have logged them both entering, Irvine at the same time as this asshole at his feet; it'll look suspicious if they don't haul ass back to prison authorities.

He can sack punch Kinneas, if he's so concerned about making it look more authentic.

He smiles when the cowboy less-than-politely refuses and blows Kinneas a kiss, and then with one lingering backward glance from Quistis, they are both gone.

And suddenly it's this guy at his mercy and not the other way around, and y'know, this is an awful nice knife- got it off Quistis' utility belt, and of course, with that stick jammed permanently up her tight little fucking ass, she'd never let any of her equipment go to hell, even if it's only borrowed.

Got one hell of an edge on this thing.

Nifty little thing about knives with theses kinds of edges on them-

Doesn't take much pressure to cut through anything, from the superficial dermis layer all the way down to the ligaments holding together the knee cap- and the great thing is, you don't even need all those 1,000 RPM's of electric-humming motor behind it to reach those ligaments- edge'll take care of that for you.

He is ready when this man who has spent Seifer's entire time at D-District keeping him in the eternal ninth circle of hell that is all the shit they've done to him wakes up.

He palms the back of his head just like they did to him and slams it into the corner of the bed hard enough to split the guy's forehead down to the bone, and a viper-quick thrust of a stab pins the guy to the bed by the shoulder as he flops down across it.

Oh yeah- that scream's music to his fucking ears. Warms his whole goddamned chest, and you want to know the greatest fucking part?

He's just getting started.

* * *

><p>He kicks things off with the guy's nails when he comes to again, just like they did with him: the tip of that knife pops them off easy as you fucking please, baring little pink-glistening worms of nakedly vulnerable nail bed that remind him of his own.<p>

He hammers the guy's head into the side of the bed again when he starts to peel himself up off the floor- once, twice, again, fucking _again _and how do _you _fucking _like it_-

And just like Seifer always sort of suspected, the guy's a fucking pussy, big bad and mean only when he's in charge, because now he's crying and shitting himself and scrabbling around for any sort of handhold that will heave him back onto those monstrous goddamned feet-

He stabs the knife down through one of those feet and rears back with a front kick that takes the fucker in the chest like a battering ram, slamming him back against the bed and pulling that foot through a long bone-grate of a slide down that rips it neatly in half. The blood that spurts up out of his boot squishes underneath Seifer's own bare feet, rippling between his toes like silt squirting up out of his mother's beach.

He doesn't have a drill, but what the hell: he's pretty good at improvisation.

Three quick stabs don't drive all the way through the knee to the cap, but they do tip the guy howling over onto his side clutching his leg, which makes him feel pretty fucking warm and fuzzy.

He takes the opportunity presented to him when the guy rolls over onto his side to knife him in the other leg, and this stab does puncture all the way through now: he feels it grate up against bone with a long dry stick-scratch of a slide across it.

Reminds him of running his stick-sword up and down the side of the orphanage, over and over and over again until Matron enticed him away with milk and cookies fresh from the oven.

He twists his fingers into the guy's hair and brings them nose to nose, so close he can see sweat stippled like freckles across the asshole's nose, and here we go- he's got enough saliva in his mouth to work up a nice clot of it after all.

Must've been saving up just for this.

"Wanna' die yet?" he asks casually, keeping one hand on the handle of that knife sticking up out of the fuckwit's leg.

A low back-of-the-throat animal whimper is his answer.

"No? Guess we're not done, then. After all, you did stick me in shit water for three days, with a bunch of metal spikes tearing into my arms and legs every time I so much as twitched. Three days is a long time to try and hold yourself perfectly still, you know that? And forget drifting off for a second- you're too fucking uncomfortable for that, and if by some miracle of Hyne you actually manage it, you get a nasty little surprise. You know the guy who pulled me out had to pull out half a foot of spike from my stomach? I was almost dead- I lucked out in not hitting any vital organs, otherwise even a Curaga wouldn't have saved my ass." He wrenches the knife free with a moist suction-cup slurp and taps it against the guard's nose. "And you never asked me if I wanted to die. The difference between me and you is, I'm gonna' let you."

He fits as many of his teeth as he can manage into a smile. "Just not for a while."

* * *

><p>When they find the man on the floor of Seifer's cell with his throat slit, they do not even beat him: they are too stunned for that.<p>

They move his execution up by four days, to be carried out at 1700 hours the following evening.

* * *

><p>Balamb Garden<p>

Balamb

"Ellone, sweetheart, you've got a visitor."

"I do?" Her voice is a skeletal rasp of a thing, pulling itself up out of the grave. "Is it…is it Zell?"

"No, sweetheart- it's your uncle. Laguna's here to see you."

"He…he is?" Her mind is spinning away again, swirling between green-eyed boys with mothers who used to love them and handsome nervously pacing young soldiers, hands clasped at their backs-

"My mother- what is my mother doing to me-"

"What? Ellone, honey, what are you talking about? Your mother is dead, sweetheart- she's been dead for years-"

Knife-scrapes of nails on her back in the dark, drawing blood, or is it his back -she's not _sure_- she has green eyes and blonde hair, doesn't she, and Quistis Trepe is the most important thing in the world to her-

Her uniform is a salt-crusted wad in all her open wounds and there's a woman blinking down at her, the sun rising like a halo behind her head-

"Who is she who am I do you know who I am and what my mother's doing to me- why is she _hurting _me- where's Quistis, tell me where Quistis is-"

"Ellone? Ellone, it's Laguna."

"_I don't know what to do or think everyone is hurting me they told me none of you loved me you were all just using me_-"

"What's wrong with her?"

"I don't know. She's been having headaches and flashbacks for a couple of days now, sporadically, and then yesterday she was helping me file and she just collapsed all of a sudden-"

"_Tell me what I'm supposed to do, please_!"

"It's ok, Ellone, sweetheart, shh, Ellone I'm here- it's Laguna. I'm going to keep you safe, ok? Remember I always promised to keep you safe, honey? Tell me what's wrong."

The boy with the knight's sword and the bright flame-glowing eyes, glossed over in fever- his mother is _raping _him, it's not even the first time and he is scared and hurting and he just wants his mother back please someone help him she doesn't know what to _do_-

"The boy- Seifer? His name's Seifer."

"Seifer's not here right now, honey."

"He needs someone to help him. His mother-"

"Seifer's mother is dead too, sweetheart."

"No no no no no no no no nononononono_no_! She's hurting him- she's…she's-"

Something clicks and tumbles over inside her brain and now she is falling falling falling and there's a woman behind a piano sweeping soft brown-velvet hair behind her ears-

"Julia sure is pretty," she says, giggling; there's a breath-fogged arc of plastic in front of her and there are children and voices and pretty twirling lights in here with her-

"If I had only gone to Winhill with Ellone…I would've been able to see Raine one last time."

"Ellone? Honey? Calm down, all right? I'm right here with you, sweetheart, I'm not leaving- Raine's not here right now. She's gone, remember? It's just been you and me for a while now, but that's ok, Ellone- I'm gonna' take care of you. I promised I would."

"_Mommy mommy mommy_!"

"Can't you give her something, Dr. Kadowaki? Please- oh _shit_, Ellone, stop, _stop _it-"

-but there are _things _underneath her skin and she has to get them out she _has to get them out_- they're burning her and it's not until she claws up long orange-peel curliques of fresh meat-shimmering skin that they promise to leave her alone, as long as she takes her eyes too-

"_Ellone stop it_!"

The man with the nice voice sounds terrified, but it's going to be all right soon, it'll be just _fine _if only she can pop her eyes dripping from their sockets, they are the real problems-

The voices are telling her just what to do, don't worry, please-

"I don't need them anymore- it's ok- it's _ok _but there are things inside me and they won't leave until I do this, ok, just _trust me_, please-"

There is a brief bee sting of pain in her arm that becomes an ocean swell of black, hurtling up and up in front of her eyes, and now the voices and the things inside of her are gone because _she _is gone, there is nothing left but blank night-shadowed canvas, as far as she can see-

* * *

><p>There is something she has never told anyone before.<p>

She hates the sight of blood. She has learned to suppress this, of course- you don't get far in Garden acting like a girl. It's easy enough to train the initial flinch from your voice and your face, the queasy slithering in your stomach that will become a slick jumble of cafeteria lunch in your sink, later.

But there is still this whimpering little part of her that cries out when arterial crimson spatters her face like a brush tip flinging paint, and now she steps back to let the man in her arms slide down into a loose-jointed pile at her feet, staring blankly at her knife.

She has a lot of murder on her hands. Some of it, of course, is justifiable- she is not entirely certain this kill itself doesn't fall neatly into that category, after everything these men have done to Seifer.

Most of it is unprovoked, an order from a pissed-off client that sends her obediently on her way, a few hundred or thousand gil richer when all is said and done and wiped neatly off on the small hand towel she brings along for just such an occasion.

It's not good to just let blood sit around on your weapon: that was one of the first things she ever learned in weapons class- clean your weapon as soon after your kill as possible, if you want it to stick around for a while. She did, of course- she'd spent most of her meager savings just on the initial purchase of her whip, and many thousands more on upgrades.

She wipes her knife off on her pants leg now, not taking her eyes off it. His won't do, not if she doesn't want to fend off questions she isn't sure how to answer- she is going to have to wear this man's uniform and identity for the next twenty-four hours after all, long enough to get Seifer safely through his execution. Moving the date up like that left her scrambling- paperwork for Nika Lauglin, Eugene Koch and Devan Rickley had not yet finished processing, which meant their requests to be appointed to D-District's firing squad would not go through until long after Seifer Almasy was dead.

The SeeD answer: kill three soldiers already appointed to the squad, and take their places.

Kyler Sint is as close to her size as she is most likely going to find; Zell doesn't fare quite so well with his new identity. Irvine helps him tuck everything in and fold everything up as best he can, until it all looks as presentable as they are going to get. It only needs to get them through the night and into the next evening, after all.

"Man, how come we can't just wear the same uniforms?"

"They're all slightly different according to rank, numbnuts," Irvine informs him brusquely. "If the uniform and the I.D.'s don't match up, we're gonna' be in shit. Can't afford that, with Almasy's neck on the line."

"I'm gonna' kill him when we get out of here," Zell grumbles, tipping up the visor on his helmet. "You know what I would be doing right now if I wasn't friends with Seifer?"

"Screwing Ellone like a rabbit who's gone through three heat cycles and still hasn't gotten laid?"

"You'll need to get in line," Quistis cuts in before he can respond to Irvine's jab. She has already devised a million different scenarios in which he goes to his death at her hands. She will never act them out, of course, but it's nice to pretend, it is nice to imagine, for just a moment, that she can make him pay for everything he has put her through these past few weeks.

She slips her new sidearm into the holster dangling from the utility belt at her waist, and watches Zell and Irvine do the same.

These new identities are precariously fragile; she can only pray they hold up long enough. Without corresponding paperwork legitimizing them as soldiers in Galbadia's army, she will not be able to check out a getaway vehicle from the lower level garage, which leaves her options dishearteningly limited: she can charm one out of the bored guard manning the booth blocking its entryway- hard to do, in a helmet that shields her entire face- or find a way to steal one that will go unnoticed until their dramatic escape the following night.

She does not want to kill anyone else; too many bodies stacking up will raise questions that might lead authorities straight back to them.

This is all her fault. If she hadn't let him talk her into coupling like two hormonally-driven teenagers alone together for the first time when she had far more important things to attend to, when she _knew _that this one little slip in composure could bring everything tumbling down around their heads-

But she loves him. And she has always understood that love sometimes trumps logic- it is why she has avoided it for so long.

She checks the chamber of her pistol to ensure that it is ready to go at a moment's notice and tilts a briskly businesslike nod at them both. "Let's go. We've got a lot to take care of before tomorrow."

* * *

><p>Balamb Garden<p>

Balamb

He sat with his head in both hands at her bedside.

She was quiet now, finally- whole floor was quiet in fact, midnight having come and gone, the hands in the clock on the wall above his head tick tick ticking over into 2:00 in the morning and finding him still just as stiffly, vigilantly awake as he had been for the past several hours.

He couldn't sleep, with her lying there just as still and pale as Raine's white-moon headstone. Hell, he was never going to sleep again, until she could talk to him in a voice that was her own sweetly uplifting timbre with the perpetual smile behind it, and not this gravel-rasping…_thing _that kept coming out of her.

Why _her_, of all people? Why Ellone Andrin, who had never hurt anything, who had never even _contemplated _hurting anything- why _her_, his last memento of Raine and a sunny scrubbed-clean bar where they had all been happy, where they had all been _together_-

She couldn't leave him, didn't she understand that? He had lost Raine and Ward and Julia and he was just barely clinging onto his son, most days, and he couldn't _make it _without her, please, please please _please _she had to understand that-

In a chair across from him on the other side of her bed, Kiros dozed fitfully, a frown through his brow and both arms over his chest.

He picked up one of her hands in his own and brought it up to his cheek, closing his eyes-

It was just so _cold_ and he didn't know what to do, Ellone honey, tell him something, _anything_, he'd do anything for her- she knew that, didn't she; she was not alone, he was right here and he wasn't going anywhere and he loved her, ok? He loved her so much-

He flicked his free hand up to smear tears from underneath his lashes, and now a coolant hiss pulled his head around toward the door, blinking.

Squall stepped inside with a brief word to the Palace guards outside the infirmary, and Ellone's limply unresponsive hand half-slid from his grip as he turned to face his son, sniffling. "Squall?"

"How's she doing?"

"Not…uh…not well, you know?" He kissed her fingertips and folded her hand carefully back down across the other one, balled up in a hard knot on top of her chest. "Doc doesn't know what's going on with her. She's sedated, right now; she's only conscious now and again anyway, and when she is-"

_-I need to take them out don't you understand I _need them out _there are things in me please get them out _get them out _get _me _out why isn't anyone coming for me why am I all _alone _in here_-

He shook his head. "I don't uh-" He coughed the crack from his voice. "Sorry, it's just…I don't know what to _do_, you know? She just looks so helpless, lying here…reminds me of when Adel took her- she was still real little, you know, and Ward and Kiros and I…we just took off- that was when Raine was pregnant with you, and I never even knew. I was so scared she was dead or…or _twisted_, that when I showed up at last to save her she wouldn't be this little girl who pulled my hair and snuck Raine's hand into mine when we weren't paying attention…and then we found her in Odine's lab and it was still her, and she just…she just put her arms around my neck like she'd been waiting for me all that time-"

Squall cleared his throat awkwardly.

Laguna rubbed his face wearily, leaving one palm pressed tight up against his forehead. "I'm sorry. I just…I don't know what I'm going to do, if something happens to her."

"Do you want me to sit with you for a while?" his son asked very quietly, and Laguna pulled his face slowly away from his hand with a stunned half second of a blink he had to repeat several times. Squall's forehead rumpled into something faintly resembling panic, and for just a moment something unknotted and peeled away and knocked loosely around inside his chest; Laguna's mouth flickered toward a smile.

"I'd like that. Thank you."

"You're welcome," the boy said stiffly, scraping a chair he seized by its metal back over the floor toward him. "I would've…I would've come sooner. I just didn't know…it was this bad."

"It wasn't until just this afternoon. Sounds like it's been off and on, since then. Not sure exactly how long it's been going on; when Ellone was…coherent, she couldn't remember exactly when it all started, and then after that…well."

Squall's hand flashed out toward that lump of circulation-bled white that was the knot of her fingers, froze in a mid-air hesitation, and then slowly stretched and reached and came down on the bed beside her cheek.

He brushed hair gently away from her face, and Laguna saw his throat flex like he was trying to swallow around something inside of it.

He hardened the jaw line that kept trying to flop open around a sob, and set his hand down lightly on his son's shoulder, squeezing gently.

Squall let him keep it there.

* * *

><p>There are two places she goes, when the voices come for her.<p>

The first is a sunlit bar with a handsome young soldier and Raine Leonhart, smiling at one another over fresh oil-polished wood.

The second is a paint-peeling cottage by the sea, only this time the children are hers, and Zell Dincht is all grown up, balancing a laughing little boy and girl on either hip, up to his ankles in outgoing tide-

She runs toward them with a smile on her face and both arms outstretched, and he is there to catch her, he is spinning her around with her dress billowing up in soft breeze-blown folds like Matron's fluttering windswept sheets, flapping out of her hands down the beach-

His lips are warm and soft and salt-flavored against her own.

In the evenings she sits with her head on his shoulder and he backpedals his feet along the porch to arc them a lazy bone-creaking foot in the air, and the boy makes a wild lurch of a jump onto its padded swingarm, brandishing a stick.

Zell suggests they change his name to Seifer.

At night he sleeps but she does not, because this is when the voices all begin to howl hurricane protests inside her head, on and on and on until she just wants them to _stop_-

There is a woman with flame-glowing hair on her porch and she is here for Ellone's children, she is here for all the children because she needs to burn them-

"_Zell_!"

"_Zell_!" she calls out plaintively, and a voice that is not his answers her, and hands that are not his stroke long whispers of callused reassurance down her cheeks-

"Zell's not here, honey. Ellone, can you hear me? It's Laguna."

"Uncle Laguna?"

"Yes, Ellone, it's me- Squall's here too. How do you feel, honey?"

-there are fingers in her mind and that woman is taking her _children _and when Zell tries to stop her she shoves a long razor-tipped hand through his chest that exits out his back to one side of his spine-

"I'm _scared_-"

"I know, sweetheart, but it's ok; I won't let anything happen to you, ok? And Zell will be back soon- he'll come see you right away, I promise."

What is going on inside of her- the beach is dissolving all around her and now every time she blinks open her eyes there is a smear of midnight all around her that goes on as far as she can see, speckled with little gem-winking dots of white-

She is breathing in winded gasps of recycled air that hiss like knives between her lips-

A heavy salt-weighted blink tears the blood-crust from her eyes, and above her looms her mother like a fairytale monster-

"_She's going to hurt me_! Please don't let her get me-"

"No one's going to get you, Ellone honey- you're at Garden, don't you remember? You're in the infirmary and you're safe, I promise-"

"I'm not I'm not I'm _not_-"

"Dr. Kadowaki, can you-"

"Shh, shh, shh, Ellone; Ellone you're going to be fine, do you hear me? Zell's going to be back very soon and he's going to sit here with your uncle and make sure you're safe and not alone, ok, sweetheart? I know he'll want to see you as soon as he's home."

-he's a string-cut puppet in her arms, all flopping loose-jointed limbs and wood-clacking mouth, opening and closing-

"He's _dead_!"

"He's not dead, Ellone! Shh, honey- he's not dead, he's fine-"

"_No he's dead and she's taking them away how do I stop her no one will let me out of here I'm all alone I can't _save_ them-_"

There is another prick in her arm that brings another fold of night-dark ocean wave crashing back down over her eyes-

* * *

><p><em> -rinoa are you still talking to her-<em>

"Yep."

_-good rinoa that's very good we're so proud of you keep talking to her ok don't let her forget about you we need her help she's the only one who can help us who _will _help us do you understand rinoa-_

"Ok."

* * *

><p>Dingo Desert<p>

Galbadia

It's not a public execution, not quite: mob control, and all that.

But they've got a couple of camera crews out here all for him, just to be sure no one misses this unprecedented event: come one, come all, watch Seifer Almasy unstoppable SeeD extraordinaire and all around bastard get himself shot full of a couple new holes to shit out of.

Too bad they don't know that this rope looped in a complex figure eight around both wrists is only there because he is holding it in place.

He smiles and winks and mouths 'suck my dick' right into the cameras, and then he sits down dutifully in the chair they push him into, the platform underneath him squeaking warningly.

He doesn't recognize any of the uniforms, but the soldier on the far left tips a subtle inclination of a nod toward him, and he knows those pink-glossed lips that are a tense little slash in the tightly-clenched lower half that is the only part of her face he can see.

They're as familiar as the back of his hand, after all.

All five shooters take their mark; he hears tinny _click click clicks _of safeties going off, and shifts onto his left cheek as a fraying piece of chair back jabs him in his right side.

A helmetless soldier walks slowly down the line tapping each on the shoulder, and each time his hand lifts up and pulls away a thumb is thrust steadily unshaken into the air; all ready to go.

So's he.

He keeps his eyes on that narrow little slit of a visor where he knows her eyes are, and in the brief half second before the cameras swing around to get a shot of him from the front, he lets his eyes go soft and his mouth untwist just slightly.

She shoulders her rifle.

Down the line, all five guns slide up into smoothly efficient angles of shoulder arms that tip the muzzles away from him for just a moment.

He catalogues all the guards fanned out in a loose semi-circle around them with a carefully casual flick of his eyes: two to his right back behind the line of fire, another three to the left of that metal-glinting firing squad, and half a dozen more for good measure scattered at random intervals throughout the rest of them.

Shoulders arms becomes at ready.

He's going to keep his eyes on her until it's time to move, because if something goes wrong and this wind-scoured desert wasteland is going to be his grave, he wants her to be the last thing he sees here.

* * *

><p>She can feel sweat trickling down her neck and getting in her eyes.<p>

Her throat is nerve-scorched raw, screaming for water.

There is a fleeting touch of a hand on her shoulder and she understands what to do, even if she does not want to: her thumb flips out like a hitchhiker optimistically trying car after car, and now her rifle is a long cold weight against her dented sweat-stinking armor.

His eyes do not leave hers, and she can see in his face that he is _trusting _her, he is sitting back and letting her control the reins for once-

_So don't fuck it up_, she can almost hear him say, and for just a moment she flashes on all the things she did not have time to prepare before this moment: the escort vehicle that dropped them here that she is going to have to commandeer somehow, because she could not get anything else, the dozen men they are going to have to take out in addition to the two sharpshooters among them, the camera crew that might inadvertently get in or block their way-

The helmetless guard with the polite hand tap she can still feel half a minute later hollers a command that brings all five rifles professionally upright, shining in the hot desert sun going nuclear in the sky above them.

She is not particularly skilled with a gun- proficient, but nothing awe-inspiring, nowhere near Irvine's skill level or even Zell's, for that matter. She has never spent much time with them, beyond the necessary basic training required in all the weapons classes she has ever taken-

But she does not have to be a crack shot to kill a man at point-blank range, and her first victim is standing to her right, close enough that she can feel his elbow brushing up against hers.

* * *

><p>He's got no regrets.<p>

Well, maybe he's got a few, but she is still in love with him, she is risking her very fucking _life _just for shitty asshole Seifer Almasy, so for right now everything else can just fuck the hell off.

Behind his back he slides that coil of rope down onto the chair underneath his ass, holding both arms tensely ready.

He's got one last smile for her that he can feel crinkling his eyes up at the corners, and he hopes she gets that he's ok with dying here, as long as they get away-

But he'd rather not.

He's going to give her a home and a dog and a ring and whatever the fuck she wants if they make it out of here, and he'd rather stick around to fend off Pubes' emo-faced advances with his own bare goddamned hands; can't trust Trepe to do it herself, because she's short bus fucking stupid when it comes to that sort of thing.

Her helmet swivels around toward him, just for one bare breathless second that freezes everything- his heart and the slow dry slide of his tongue along his lips and those douchebag cameramen aiming their boom mikes at him, and then this moment thaws and everything all runs together at once for him like two fucking trains jumping the track to head-on into each other-

And he watches all their guns shift from the tops of their shoulders to the creases, and for one last bare breathless second blood congeals around his heart and in his throat because she is aiming right at him, and then suddenly her rifle swings around as two more swerve out of alignment-

* * *

><p>-and she fires.<p> 


	15. Interlude Seven

**A/N: Thanks for your reviews as always, guys, and the novelization is happening, whether anyone wants it to or not; I just wasn't sure whether anyone other than myself would be interested in reading it, so I wasn't sure whether or not I should actually post it. But you know, I think there will be at least a few people who would like a new spin on the plot, so I've decided I will post after all- I'm already working on it, although progress is going to be slow, since the majority of my writing time will be spent on this. I won't start posting anything on the novelization until this is done, because time between updates would probably be unreasonable, as this story is my priority right now. From what I have envisioned, I think it could be really interesting (and epic) but whether or not I can actually pull it off is a whole 'nother story.**

**I'll be out of town this weekend, with no computer access, so I won't be able to update, but I know I left you guys a horrible cliffhanger, so I'll try and post the next chapter early next week. I'll be home Sunday night, but will probably be too tired to deal with any editing, so depending on how much time I have after work, I'll try and get the next chapter up either Monday or Tuesday. Until then, enjoy this little bit of lightness.**

_Dear Selphie,_

_Got a story for you today, honey._

_So Almasy figured out how to cook eggs recently, right? (Only thing he can cook, actually.) And he decides he's gonna try to impress Quistis (told me an Dincht guys who can cook get laid more often or something) with this new-found talent. Dincht a course invites himself over for breakfast cause the man's got no sense of romance and when to leave a couple alone, and I go with him cause…well, I wanna see how this works out. _

_So he's kinda pissed already because he knows Quisty ain't gonna kick us out just so she and Seifer can screw, and he's standing there at the stove glaring at us while he's heatin some oil up in a pan, and all of a sudden that friggin Snow Lion/Wendigo hybrid Dincht insists is a dog comes thundering up to the back step and starts poundin on the door with his paw. (We figured out a while back he does that if he's ready to come in. Honest to Hyne knocks at the door like he's a damn person or somethin.)_

_Zell gets up to let him in, which of course pisses Almasy off more, cause by this point he pretty much figures he ain't gettin any- that dog overstays his welcome more than the crazy old aunt who wants to tell ya about all sixty of her cats- and Quisty's sittin at the table trying not to laugh cause she can see how pissed he's getting. _

_Then the oil in the pan catches on fire. And course, he's running around cussing trying to figure out how to put it out (turns out water doesn't work so well on oil fires,) and now the dog's all worked up and he starts running around in circles in the kitchen, and slams right into Almasy's legs. Now, Seifer's a big guy, but you've never seen a dog like this, Selphie honey- swear to Hyne he's got me by a foot. So Almasy flips over the back of him, catches himself on his head, and now Quisty's standing up and bending over him asking if he's ok, and he just springs right back onto his feet, bleeding from this nice little cut on his forehead, and all of a sudden there's this blur of fur and pissed-off blonde guy that I think is some kind of wrestling match to the death, slamming into the cupboards and the stove, taking out half the chairs, and Dincht's running around screeching at Seifer not to hurt his dog, and then one of those paws comes up and socks Almasy right in the nuts._

_ Shoulda seen the look on his face, Selph. I ain't kiddin._

_ So he says some words I ain't gonna repeat and keels over holding himself, and the dog starts lickin his face like they're best friends again, and Seifer's mumbling something about how long of a rope he's gonna need to string the thing up, so Dincht kicks the dog out real quick. _

_ Quistis bandages his head up while he says some more stuff I still ain't gonna repeat, and then he goes back to tryin to salvage breakfast. (Like to point out that I was the hero of the day who put the fire out.) He keeps making these pointed little comments to me an Dincht, clearly insinuatin we need to get the hell out so he and Quisty can get with the lovemaking, and we pretend we don't get what he's hinting at cause we're assholes like that, and it's fun to bait the guy. _

_He's all pissed off again, course. So he's standin there at the stove fuming and not really paying attention to what he's doin, and he flips the egg on his spatula real hard- way too damn hard- and it goes flying up into the air and comes back down to land on his head, and we all burst out laughing cause for a second he's just standing there wearing it like it's a Hyne-damned hat. _

_He peels the egg off his head and throws it in Dincht's face, cause it's all his fault for some reason, and you know Zell, Selphie- doesn't matter if it's been on the floor or in someone's pocket he's gonna eat it, so he pops it right in his mouth and tells Seifer he's had better- it lacks a 'certain culinary jeans cock' are his exact words, cause he's an idiot and he's never been able to figure out how to pronounce je ne sais quoi. We're all just bustin up at this point, Quisty most of all, and I thought for a second Almasy was gonna punch his head right off his shoulders, but after a few choice words for Dincht he promises he won't kill him if Quisty comes and helps him shower all the egg out of his hair. _

_That's right about the time I figure it's finally time to give the poor guy a break, and I drag Zell outta there. Figured it was my personal little gift to the world- wouldn't believe how much nicer the guy is after those two have had a little alone time. _

_ I hope they're gonna make it. I think we would have, if you hadn't gotten taken away from me too soon, don't ya agree, Selph?_

_ I love you._

_ Love,_

_ Irvine_


	16. Chapter Eight

**A/N: Dee, the scene where Seifer gets socked in the nuts by the dog is actually inspired by my own Great Pyrenees. (If anyone hasn't heard of this breed before, they are basically a shaggy, dog-shaped polar bear with a tendency to think they own you rather than the other way around.) While he has yet to punch anyone in the sack, he has literally punched me in the leg before with his massive paw when he decided I wasn't paying enough attention to him. He is quite the interesting animal.**

**Chapter Eight**

D-District Prison

Dingo Desert

He comes down like a fucking hammer with the rope from his wrists a tight-pulled garrote between his hands, and everything explodes.

Two sharpshooters and a guard near the vehicle parked off to one side drop simultaneously and now there's a whole fucking riot going on around him: swinging gun butts and thrashing feet and fists and blurred arcs of spear jabs, going for the throat-

He hears a crunch and a scream and now there's a bright sunlit splash of crimson, painting his teeth.

His hand trails frayed fibers of rope strand whipping around behind him as he spins, stiff-arming a soldier rushing in from his left, and this abrupt halt of forward momentum staggers him backward just slightly, and _fuck_, he's off-balance enough that he can't get to that gun muzzle swinging a silver-glittering arc up toward his head in time-

Hyne bless that fucking cowboy.

The tall lanky soldier on the very end of the firing line swerves his rifle up from the hip and gets off a shot that takes the asshole right through the head.

He drops like a fucking avalanche and Seifer unfurls that length of rope like Quistis snapping her whip; it's just the split second distraction he needs, and the guard that flinches instinctively back away from it gets an uppercut to the throat that reels him up against another, like dominoes.

He used to be real goddamned good at tipping over Quistis' carefully constructed dominoe structures, like neatly regimental columns of soldiers lined up for inspection all going down at once under a cannon shot.

Let's see if he's still got the same touch.

* * *

><p>She springs, and thuds hollowly feet-first into the man's chest; a hand fisted up in the thin sheathe of material wrapping his neck lets her ride him all the way down to the ground, where she uses him as a springboard to launch herself right into the arms of another guard, knife in hand.<p>

Her removal of his helmet and the jab of the weapon in her hand is a seamless one-two combination that lasts hardly as long as a blink, and when she pulls away the man is spraying humour and blood from the crumpled ruin of his right eye socket.

Zell fires a round point blank into the side of his head to finish him off.

From the direction of the news van she hears screaming and hastily scrabbling feet, struggling in the loose sand.

Irvine's rifle comes up through another arc- one two three, he is _fast_, and she has always known this, but watching three soldiers drop from shots so close together she can barely distinguish them from one another awes her anyway, just a little.

"Almasy!" Zell screams, and kicks a sword whose wielder has just died in the sand at his feet across the desert ground toward Seifer.

It's not Hyperion, but she's seen him with similar training weapons, and she knows it will be almost just as good.

She wishes, for just a moment, that she had her whip, but it's a fleeting thought she doesn't have time to dwell on- she's just going to have to make do with what she does have: three adrenaline-fueled SeeDs at her back and this knife in her hand. Her gun is getting knocked around in the sand somewhere underneath their feet where she dropped it when one of the guards shouldered her out of the way to try and get a shot off at Seifer, and she does not have time to look for it.

Seifer pirouettes and leaps and thrusts from the hip in one textbook motion that is as flawless as he can make it, with the ground going blood-slick underneath his feet.

Someone screams; it is harsh and high and keening, and it strangles into a blood-gurgling almost-sob as Seifer's sword punches through an unguarded neck like it is soft butter, and now he is spinning toward her with blood spraying horizontally out away from him, and in her chest her heart goes still and silent and numb, because it looks like it is all coming from him-

Two holes through the shoulder and a long gory furrow across his ribs, this is what she sees, what she cannot look away from-

-and her veins twitch like snakes and boil over with static electricity crackle, only this is not _possible_, because she has not junctioned in over a year-

Irvine cracks the butt of his rifle into a Galbadian who makes a lunge for her as she folds forward onto both knees, and she sees Seifer's eyes go wide and his lips compress around the edges-

-and from knee height she watches Zell throw aside his empty rifle and lunge forward with both fists out, in his element now, and he is almost beautiful to observe, all speed and grace and faultless form as he throws elbows and knees and side kicks that blow out knees with matchstick snaps that echo rolling in her ears-

* * *

><p>From here he can't tell why she's down.<p>

He only knows that he has to get to her.

He trusts Kinneas to cover for him as he scrambles across the sand toward her, one of his knees click click clicking like a fucking bomb counting down, and he thinks the fucker's about to cave on him two seconds before it does.

Zell sees it happening and gets him by the elbow before he can go all the way down and now he's hanging there like a piece of overripe fucking fruit swaying on a brunch, just dangling from that hand pulling Wuss down with him, because the shit's three times smaller than a normal man and can't support his weight.

"Kinneas!" he screams, and he can feel something in his goddamned throat, wad of blood or maybe even a little piece of flesh from his last victim, but it doesn't fucking _matter _because it's got nothing to do with her-

The cowboy fires over her head into the throat of the man advancing on her from behind, and now she is standing, slowly but steadily and he can _breathe _again- the sight's enough to scrabble his legs around in the sand underneath him until he can fumble everything back into working order, and he's got a shoulder on fire and some bruised-up ribs that hurt like a bitch, but he charges anyway, because some asshole is drawing a bead on her head off to his left-

He can't make it in time, but Kinneas is right there at his back, shoulder blades to shoulder blades, and he squeezes off another shot that blows blood and brain matter all over the place.

"I'm fine," she says when he reaches her, but he can tell she is lying. He grabs her by one wrist and feels spongy blood-moist flesh giving way underneath his hand, and now his eyes trail down toward her arms and he recoils back in horror as twitching blue-white worms of maggot-squirming lights crawl up her arms-

And suddenly it clicks that he can see her arms at all, when they should be covered by her uniform, and he realizes they have been singed back to little black-frayed cuffs that terminate at her elbows-

And something slams him over the back of the head as she opens her mouth to yell, and underneath him the ground spins like a fucking top and his stomach smashes itself back against his spine and all he can do is try not to vomit as he sags forward against her-

* * *

><p>Battle adrenaline is the only thing keeping her on her feet right now, because they cannot afford to lose her.<p>

He is too heavy for her to hold up, so she steps back just far enough that he will not land on her as he pitches forward, and she realizes numbly that she is still gripping her knife, it's handle arctic against her fingertips-

And she launches herself like a javelin, like one of Zell's hip-powered punches, up over his body and into a leap forward that buries her knife to the hilt in the man's throat, and the fingers that grip the blade he holds at the ready to carve away the head of Seifer Almasy spasm and open and twist into claws that hook into the sand as he crumples.

"Seifer."

"Ungh."

"_Seifer_." She folds a hand over her mouth to hold back the bile that keeps cresting like a lap of ocean wave up against her lips. She thinks the man didn't have time to bring the blade around after a counterstrike from Zell and only hit him with the handle, but his hair is so matted with blood she can't quite make out the damage, and his eyes gyrate little half-conscious flickers that peel his lashes hazily apart as she slips an arm underneath him.

The man who tapped her shoulder is lunging toward her, and in her ears clangs a siren's screech of alarms going off inside the prison, and she doesn't have time to get him back on his feet right now.

She picks up the man's sword and stops his lunge with a clumsy thrust forward that is inelegant but does the trick, because he cannot stop in time: the blade punches through his stomach, hangs up in his vertebrae and then finally scrapes all the way through his back to point out the other end like an accusatory finger, smeared red. When she turns around Irvine and Zell have Seifer on his feet again, propped up between them until they are sure he can walk on his own, and that alarm is still beating against her brain like a fist- _clangclangclang _it's too _loud_ _everything _is too loud she can't _stand _it-

The news van is gone and their way is clear, for now, and she sees Zell's hand sweep up through a frantic loop that motions her toward them-

But the _alarm_-

_-that's weird can you hear me too I didn't think you could hear me they didn't tell me you could hear me quistis quistis that's your name right I think I almost remember you-_

Seifer is pushing their arms off his shoulders, and pivoting on a heel to face her.

Zell has already reached the armored personnel carrier that transported gear and prisoner and soldiers alike and is scrambling into it with the keys swinging from one hand, and she thinks vaguely _that was smart of him I never even saw who had the keys_, and now there is a voice in her head with the klaxon of the alarms undulating toward her across the sand-

_-if you can hear me quistis will you help me I need someone to help me they said none of you really loved me that you were all just pretending but that can't be true right I don't _want _it to be true_-

The voice scrubs her brain raw and sends her howling to both knees and against her ears her hands scratch desperate make-it-stop pleas that arch his own hand down toward her face to rip her fingers away-

"The fuck are you _doing_? Quistis, _stop_, for shit's sake-"

_-quistis quisty please please please _please _I need _help _don't leave me here all alone-_

"_Almasy_! We gotta' go now!"

He slides an arm underneath one of her shoulders and heaves her across him like she is a doll and now the ground and her head and her heart are all jouncing jouncing jouncing, crashing together, going under, and the voice keeps picking away at her brain like it is a finger and her mind the scab-

_-quisty don't leave me please _please _don't leave me I'm all alone and I'm so scared you have no idea what it's like out here all alone-_

Somewhere behind her are running feet and rumbling vehicles and shouted orders and ahead of her that APC expands like a balloon, twice the size she thinks it is supposed to be-

Irvine has his helmet off now and he slides down the shield on the passenger window and pokes his head outside into the dry sand-swirling air, rifle in hand-

And there's a hinge-screech of a door being slammed aside, and suddenly she impacts unceremoniously against cold steel, Seifer's arm cushioning her as best he can, and the thunder of Irvine's gun makes her scream, because it rachets up the pressure in her head-

* * *

><p>"<em>Quistis<em>!"

He pulls the back doors shut behind them one-handed, keeping her head up off the floor with the other.

"What's going on back there?" Zell calls over his shoulder, twisting around in his seat to cast a frowning brow-puckered look back at them as Irvine slips back inside the truck, dragging his rifle after him.

"Just fucking floor it! I've got her."

He goes back to shaking her shoulder as she curls up around him, moaning, his heart in his throat and a fist twisted up in his gut, and he wants to know what the _fuck _is going on, what's _happening _to her-

"Quistis. Instructor. _Trepe_!" He hisses all her monikers like they are numbers in a combination and he need only stumble on the right order to bring her upright in his arms, blinking open her eyes-

The truck hits a rut and smashes him up against the side of one wall, careening him off his fucked-up shoulder, and he coils one arm around her and holds the fuck on with his teeth gritted, bracing her against his chest.

"Hold on back there!" Irvine warns, and another jolt and subsequent swerve slam him off the opposite wall, and for just a moment an entire burned-out galaxy wipes itself across his eyes, starless.

Quistis groans in his arms, and he drops his sword to get both of them around her, shielding her as they both go airborne again; this landing bounces his already spinning head off the floor, and for just a second he blacks out.

When he comes to, they're getting shot at, chain-rattles of machine gun fire that split his throbbing skull open further, and against his chest Quistis pries her eyes sleepily open, squinting up at him. "What's-"

He heaves her up with him as he tries to stand, swaying; the truck bucks and shudders and rocks around them but somehow he keeps his footing, and he shoves her toward the padded lip of the back seat, upending her gracelessly over the top of it to pool on the leather-cracked upholstery. Irvine instinctively shoots out a hand to keep her in place, and Seifer reels drunkenly toward the machine gun turret steel-welded down to the bed of the truck.

He slips both his feet into the hollowed-out rests at its base and bangs aside the bullet-proof panel that opens onto barren wind-whipped sand, nosing the muzzle of the gun forward out into the heat-rippling air.

"Drive faster!" he screams, and opens fire.

* * *

><p><em>-you're ellone right you're ellone and the other one is quistis I'm <em>remembering _I can remember some things now quistis is blonde and you have brown hair-_

The ceiling above her dims and blurs out and fractures into something she doesn't understand.

She is floating in a slurry medicinal haze that breaks up the face of the man leaning over her into little pieces that warp and twist and melt away.

_-just ignore him ok rinoa needs you more ellone rinoa needs your help aren't you going to help her-_

_ Who are you?_

She does not ask these questions aloud anymore, because they only upset this man with the scattered splintered face leaning over her.

_-we're just here to help rinoa she's been betrayed and she's all alone and she needs your help she doesn't have anyone but us anymore-_

_ But who _are _you? _

_ -it doesn't matter who we are just that we're here to help rinoa and we need you _she _needs you ellone are you going to help us-_

_ What would I have to do?_

_ -nothing right now don't worry about anything right now we just need someone to listen to us rinoa needs to know there's someone out there who cares about her-_

_ Of course I care about her, but I can't-_

_ -can't what you can't help us why can't you help us ellone-_

There is a stinger prickle in her arm that shifts when she does, and she is hovering turning tumbling, trying to get her bearings-

The ceiling above her spirals down to interweave itself in black and white checkerboards of half-conscious haze through the floor-

"-Ellone honey, you ok-"

-and she blinks/squints/crumples up her brow-

-it's so hard to _think_-

_-ellone are you still with us ellone are you listening rinoa wants to talk to you she needs to know if you're going to be here for her-_

_ But what would I have to _do_? Rinoa's not here; I don't understand how _I_-_

_ -just be here for her when she needs you ellone that's all we ask that's all we need you to do- _

_ -they're right ellone I just need someone to be there for me ok squall just left me here he doesn't love me anymore none of my friends really loved me I guess they were just pretending but I think maybe I can trust you you were always so nice to everyone-_

* * *

><p>She is not going to let this thing inside her brain- it is not Rinoa how can it <em>possibly <em>be Rinoa- win.

She sits upright, rubbing the fuzz from her eyes.

If only she could scrape it from her brain so easily.

Irvine regards her with wary concern from the passenger side front seat, transferring his rifle from the crook of his elbow to the tops of his thighs, and he stretches out one blood-spattered hand to gently brush hair from her eyes-

Behind her, she can hear the _tink tink tink _of brass on steel, and a flickering shift of her raw sand-ground eyes shows her Seifer with all the sinews in his arms standing out, hissing expletives through his teeth-

She vaults the seat and lands with a heavy thump that throws her up against one side as the truck jerks another evasive zigzag through the sand, and a light touch to his shoulder brings his gaze up and around to glance at her, but does not stir his finger on the trigger. "I'll take over. I need you to provide some mag-support. Irvine and Zell are both junctioned- you can draw from them."

"You can't be around that shit anymore," he says, and, a moment later: "Fuck!" as a stray round slips through the open panel in front of him to superficially scuff his collarbone, drawing a long thin line of bright red.

She does not have time to ask him how he knows this.

In the front seat Irvine wedges himself through the window to swing his rifle around to bear, and this new thunder is another hammer blow to her head, staggering her.

"Got 'im! Nice shooting, Kinneas," Zell screams, cranking the wheel hard to one side and then whipping it back around to the other, bouncing her off Seifer's shoulder to land blinking on the floor, both hands braced underneath her. "Everybody hold on!"

"_Shit_," Seifer snarls, and she looks up to see him clinging for dear life to the turret of the machine gun, his blood-streaming arms going wire-tight as he braces himself against the hot metal, and now the far wall is rising up to strike her like a fist as she free-falls across the interior of the truck-

-and a hand tangled up in the neck of her uniform brings her to a sudden jarring halt, his knuckles going white with her weight-

She uses his arm to pull herself back to both feet, the muscles underneath her fingers twitching like sparking stumps of live wires, undulating on the ground. The ladder in front of her further secures her footing, and rips off one of her nails as she scrambles up it one-handed, the grenade on her belt in the other.

"What the fuck are you doing?" Seifer yells from below her, and with a rusty hinge-squeak of a protest that stabs her ears like a scream, the hatch above her flips open and she thrusts her head out into rippling heat-shimmer. She pulls the grenade's pin with her teeth and spits it over the side of the truck into the sand below, and an overhand with all her strength behind it pitches the thing through the window of the vehicle flanking them, and she does not have time to congratulate herself on such a lucky shot: they have a sharpshooter of their own, swinging his weapon around in a long effortless re-direction that shows her shining smooth-polished wood and black-gaping mouth of steadily-aimed barrel-

The man's head becomes a shower of meat and bone and fluttering flag pieces of blood-soaked hair; his body folds in a graceful slow-motion slump over the side of his window and splatters on the ground below, and the truck rolls right over the top of him like he is just another fist-sized rock or desert rodent.

"Quistis!"

His voice snaps her away from the bowel-leaking mess of the man's pulverized lower half and back down into the truck; she slams the hatch over her head as the grenade detonates with a muffled _ka-thump _like the heartbeat spiraling up and up and up from the pit of her stomach into the back of her throat-

"_Fuck_!"

It is the only thing he has time to scream as something impacts them hard from the side and tilts the world like a children's toy spinning out underneath her feet, and now the ceiling is corkscrewing down toward her and suddenly Seifer is in her arms and now the floor becomes the wall, and from there the ceiling, and his shoulders hunching forward to shield her is the last thing she remembers-

* * *

><p>The man above her reaches down to brush hair from her eyes and tears from her cheeks, and now, for the first time since this has all started, she flashes into a past she's never visited before.<p>

She is a little blue-eyed blonde with parents who do not love her, playing alone in her room until they remember to feed her-

She wants Matron and the orphanage and even nasty brat-headed Seifer back, she just wants them _all _back, please, she is so very, very _tired _of waking up to silence and going to bed hungry because they are arguing again and have forgotten all about her-

_-I blink back tears as the ceiling smears into blank white forever above my head and everything is so quiet I want the sounds and smells of the ocean crawling in through my window again and Irvine playing dress-up with Selphie I want stupid mean _Seifer _with his stick sword breaking all my dolls-_

A blink of her eyes slides aside this image like a television flipping channels, and now she is the same blue-eyed blonde, older and more self-assured and still alone.

Her confidence is something she puts on like a worn old coat, to be shed at the end of the day, alone in her room where no one can see or judge or pant after her like a deity.

Tomorrow is her SeeD test, but this is not what she is thinking about.

Outside her door swirls laughter and high-pitched chatter and the clock on the wall tick-tick-ticks down another second, a minute, an hour, and on this evening when anyone else in her position would be sitting up all night with friends soothing pre-exam jitters, she has no one.

She folds her socks and the uniform she will exchange for another twenty-four hours from now, if she is as driven and skilled and motivated as all her instructors proclaim her to be, and she stares up at that clock on the wall tick-tick-ticking like her heart in her chest, winding down toward her future-

And she wants to cry- there is a burning build-up in her chest that suggests she needs to, but behind her glasses her eyes flick dry little blinks that blur the room around her and there is _nothing_, why is she so _empty_- is she the 'frosty little bitch' that annoying jerk Seifer Almasy called her the other day, in the cafeteria in front of everyone-

She doesn't want to be cold and closed-off and friendless, but what else is she supposed to be, what else _can _she be when her tentative smiles are met only with coolly uninterested looks, or fanatically fawning ones-

The knock on her door brings her smiling to both feet, because it means someone is here for her, Quistis Trepe- her roommate dropped out of Garden three days ago and has not been replaced, so it can only be a visitor for her, for _her_, and she crosses her room in an undignified sprint that flaps the loose strands of hair around her face and the tie at her neck, and now as she wrenches aside her door her smile goes brittle and tight and plastic, because the man leaning up against her frame with a smirk is horrible and familiar and five inches taller than her already.

He uses his height advantage to full effect, because he knows it irritates her, he _knows _she cannot _stand _to have her personal space invaded this way, one gloved hand still on the frame and his face a scant inch from her own-

"Heard you're taking the SeeD exam tomorrow. Betcha you're going to fail."

He makes her angry so _easily_, and this sudden frothing rage cresting up inside of her like a curl of ocean wave drowns everything else: she cannot be lonely around him, because she is too busy hating everything about his existence. "We'll see," she says coolly, crossing her arms and turning up her nose, and now the smirk on his face blossoms into a full smile, and for just a moment she blinks like an owl up at him, because he is beautiful when he smiles and she has never even noticed this before.

"How about a bet?"

"What kind of bet?" she asks suspiciously.

"If you pass, I'll stop adding your name to KP duty. If-"

"That was _you_?" she demands, cutting him off mid-sentence.

"_If _you fail, you have to kiss me. With tongue. And do my homework for a week."

"_No_. And don't you think your instructors will get suspicious when you suddenly start turning in all your assignments?" she asks in the same arctic tone she always reserves for him, tightening her arms over her chest.

He smiles again, but she is ready for it this time, and it is not nearly so blinding. "Knew it. You're scared you can't do it."

"I am _not_," she snaps. She can feel her heart in her chest beating beating beating as he leans in closer and brushes one gloved thumb across her chin-

-and the clock on the wall ticks_-_ticks-tocks and the man above her calls out a name that does not belong to the blue-eyed blonde and through anesthesia-gummed eyes she watches the boy and the girl shatter and shred apart-

_Tick tick tick tick tick tick tick tick tickticktickticktickticktick_

-_is that a clock you're thinking about ellone what's happening are you ok I don't want to hurt you you understand that right I'm not trying to hurt you-_

_-ellone-_

_-ellone are you still there-_

* * *

><p>Shit<p>

Shit

Shit

Shitshitshitshitshitshitshit_shit_-

Everything

Hurts

What's

Going on-

He doesn't _understand_-

There are little flickers of children like ghosts beneath his eyelids, playing tag on a shoreline-

He _hurts_-

He's dreaming-

He is unconscious-

He is _dead_-

His eyes spin like marbles beneath his lids, and the children wink out one by one by one.

* * *

><p><em>You dream in shades of gray. <em>

_ There is a princess awaiting your arrival in her tower, and a witch guarding its base. _

_ In your hand your brother's head drips little plink plink plinks of blood that trickle stinging down your cut-all-to-shit knuckles, and the flick of her wrist motions a come-hither command you cannot ignore-_

_ And in your brain the witch's laughter snarls like the first start-up rumble of a chainsaw coming to life, and down it roars through layers and layers of good intentions- the road to hell is fucking paved with them after all, or so you've heard- and punches through to the meat of what/who you really are-_

_ You are not here to rescue the princess. _

_ She is smiling at you from beneath the cardboard and paste of her hat- _you used to know a girl who wore those but she is maggot-chewed and molded now and she does not matter anymore_- and now she steps through the window of her tower with both hands serenely folded in front of her and trust in her eyes-_

_ And your brother's head in your hands bounces bounces bounces as you run, as your sprint through gradations of charcoal that flicker dark and darker and darker all around you-_

_ And one dainty slippered foot swings out over the side of her prison and now she is falling toward your arms with her dress fluttering out behind her and her eyes full of light and hope and love-_

_ And you catch her on your sword. _

_ She slides all the way down onto it until you can feel the supple silk-wrapped curve of her spine, sliding damply up against your hand-_

* * *

><p>There is a crack and then a slit and finally a sliver of blue leaking through all the gray and his mouth tastes like decaying half-digested meat-<p>

There's blood on his hands-

Shit-

_Shit_

He _stabbed _her-

_He stabbed her_-

* * *

><p><em>The shades of gray begin to lift and part and smoke away, and now you can see that her eyes are blue and her mouth is red-<em>

_ She is not wearing lipstick-you put that there-_

_ You-_

You_-_

_Youyouyouyouyou_

_What is _wrong _with you-_

_ You were supposed to _save _people- you were supposed to make your mother proud and your brothers and your sisters envious and this woman with the death-glossed eyes was supposed to _love _you-_

* * *

><p>He is facedown in a puddle of drool or water or blood-<p>

He is not sure anymore.

He rolls a mouthful experimentally around his tongue and spits out a teeth-thinned stream of copper- _blood shit it's _blood_- _and now that sliver widens into a half-moon of cloudless sky that keeps slipping in and out of focus and he can't move his _legs_, _fuck_-

"Seifer!"

The voice is a hoarse little whisper in his ear, sandpaper coarse.

Sandpaper or just plain sand-

What the fuck is it with sand anyway- gets fucking everywhere and he _hates _it, he fucking _hates _it- she was always more interested in playing with it than him-

"_Seifer_!" A hand on his shoulder snaps his eyes open and his head around, and the entire world reels around him like he's fucking shit-faced-

How can he see the sky?

Wasn't he in a truck?

The fuck is going on- is he dead-are they _both _dead- shit this is all his fault; he should have just left that miserable fuck to rot in D-district instead of fucking everything up and dragging her out here on this half-assed rescue mission for a man who doesn't deserve it anyway-

His head lolls back against the arms she slips underneath it, and he wants to ask her if this is a dream, if this is heaven or wherever the fuck it is people go when they're dead but still somehow hanging around-

But he can't fucking stand the thought that he might have killed her, you know? Even if they're together, even if he is in her arms and she's got her hand on his cheek- he doesn't want to be with her badly enough to get her _killed _right along with his own fucking dumb ass- please don't let her be _dead_-

He's sorry-

He-

He can't feel his legs.

_He can't feel his legs_.

"Quistis-"

"Shh."

Her name is a slack-jawed whisper, fading fast. "Quistis-"

* * *

><p>When he dies, she is the first thing he sees.<p>

Or, at least, he assumes he's dead- there's a bright light and an awful Hyne-damned pain and then just nothing, and now the only sound he can hear is the soft wind-carried cawing of gulls on a beach, spinning higher and higher on updrafts of breeze that whip her skirt around her thighs-

She is standing in the ocean, holding out her hand to him.

His boots sink ankle-deep into silt and water and seaweed and he's got his rifle in one hand and the other stretched out toward her and a smile on his face-

And someone is calling his name and shaking his shoulder and now he understands that the beach is only a dream as it collapses and folds inward and tumbles down around him-

And his blink tears salt and blood and sand from his eyes and he looks up to find Quistis Trepe hovering anxiously over him, cradling Seifer Almasy's bright blood-drenched head in her lap.

* * *

><p>"<em>Zellzellzellzellzellzell<em>-"

Tick tick tick tick tickticktickticktick goes her heart in her chest and the clock on the wall.

"Dr. Kadowaki-"

"Hold her, please. Laguna, hold her _down_-"

"_Zell_!"

"Just hold on, sweetheart- he's not here right now. He's fine. Hold still for me, please- Ellone, honey, you've got to hold _still_- Dr. Kadowaki's trying to help you-"

_-heeheeheeheeheeheeheeheehee ellone don't worry about him it doesn't matter anymore it's too late you don't need to be thinking about him-_

She can hear every tick-tick-tick inside her chest and inside the clock and please _please_, get it out of her head, it's _hurting _her-

"Ellone, sweetie, hold on-"

_-tick tick tick tick tock tock tock this is what rinoa's hearing right now ellone she's running out of time you need to help her you need to get her out of here she's all alone she's all alone and it's not _fair_-_

"It _hurts_-"

"I know, sweetheart, shh, it's ok- Dr. Kadowaki's trying to give you something to help you, but I need you to hold still ok, honey?"

_-it hurts doesn't it ellone it _hurts _well this is what rinoa's feeling this is how _bad _rinoa feels after everyone she ever loved just abandoned her-_

_ -don't hurt her I don't want to hurt her ellone can you hear me I just need someone to talk to ok please-_

Her heart and the clock tick tick tick tick tickticktickticktick and underneath her hand slides cold-winter bed railing and hangman's nooses of bed sheet she coils into lumps around her fists-

_-ellone _listen _to us stop fighting it if you stop fighting it it won't hurt so much we promise-_

"What did you mean about Zell- you said it's too late-"

"Ellone, sweetie, what are you talking about-"

_What do they mean it's too late _what is happening is he _dead_- is that what they're trying to tell her-

He _can't _be _dead_ she won't _let him_-

She hears medicinal drip drip drips of fluid-filled IV line and echoic click click clicks of time counting down and she blinks blinks blinks-

Everything is blurring and twirling and in her mouth is a slow heart-pulse of creeping copper-flavored blood and she claws up handfuls of sheets and swings out with hands that becomes fists-

And above her is that handsome young soldier, here to rescue her, and for just a moment she goes still and silent and breathless with her wrists in his hands, squinting up at him.

"Please don't let them hurt me anymore," she whispers, and now there is a hammer blow inside her head that takes everything away, and she arches like a heart attack victim under pads that arc defibrillator lightning through her chest and stomach and head it's _everywhere someone please help her_-

**A/N; You've probably noticed this chapter is quite a bit shorter than normal for me. There is no reason for this other than the fact that I decided to be mean and split the chapter in half, so I could leave off on this rather horrible cliffhanger.**


	17. Interlude Eight

**A/N: Double post today. As soon as this goes up, I am going to work on editing/uploading the next chapter, so you should see it pop up probably within an hour or so of this. Apologies for all the horrible cliffhangers lately. (Not really, though. I enjoy being somewhat cruel.)**

_Dear Selphie,_

_ Sometimes I gotta wonder why people get so attached to each other. Sometimes it seems like all we do is hurt each other, you know? _

_ There's a part of me that wonders if deep down, human beings like hurting someone they care about, just a little bit, because it gives you this sense of power, to know someone's so completely at your mercy that you can just shatter them. Maybe we feel like crap afterwards, but it doesn't stop people from cheatin on each other or sayin things they shouldn't or specifically doin something they know is going to upset their man or woman. _

_ Thing is…I like to think I'm a pretty perceptive guy. Had a lot a time to watch people at G. Garden, you know, back when I was just this lonesome gunslinger without any friends. Made a lot of observations about human interaction, specially of the man to woman type, and here's what I think, Selph:_

_ Seifer's got one of those shatterings comin his way. Wish I didn't think so, and I hope I'm wrong, but the thing is, he nuts about Quistis and she's nuts about him, any idiot can see that- but she's afraid. You know Quisty- always gotta be in control of everything, gotta have everything in hand, even when she was a little kid. Maybe you don't remember that, but I do. She used to organize everything, all her toys and her clothes, always colored inside the lines. If anything got outta place, she'd get so upset, like wearin her Monday outfit on Wednesday was just gonna bring the world crashin down around her. I think it was how she dealt with her parents dying- couldn't control what happened to them, but if she could control everything else that ever happened in her life, she'd never feel that helpless again, you know?_

_ Thing is though, you can't control love, and you can't reason with it- Hyne-damned thing just doesn't listen to you, and Quisty doesn't know how to do anything else. And course, on top of it all, she had to go and fall in love with the most unpredictable guy of them all- only thing you can predict about Almasy is that he's going to do something stupid that might get him killed. That's sorta the problem, I think- we're all soldiers, we all know we're not lookin at the kind of life spans civilians get, but if I had to bet money on any of us getting blown away, it'd be Almasy. Quisty's smart- she's gotta be thinking along the same lines. _

_ I think she's gonna wake up one morning and realize just how attached she's gotten to that idiot, and she's gonna think about what it'll feel like, wakin up one day to realize she's never gonna see him again, and she's going to panic, and throw all those little defense mechanisms right up. _

_ Funny thing is, I don't think it'll be him that screws things up- the war's changed him, Selph. Never woulda believed that until I saw it with my own eyes, but I've been spending a lot of time talking to the guy, and after everything he's gone through…I think he's afraid of getting hurt, but he's willing to take that risk, you know? You get one chance in life and you can be a bitter miserable asshole, or you can just grab onto whatever little happiness you get and go with it, and Quistis gives him that kinda happiness, and I'm not sure he's ever had it before, least not for a long time. _

_ But I don't think she's there yet. To that realization, I mean. I don't think she's loosened up enough yet- she's still gotta control everything, still gotta micromanage every little detail and take care of everything herself, and even when she was a little kid not much older than the rest of us she always wanted to take care of us all. She hasn't changed, and when you died, it tore her apart because she blamed herself- she was supposed to keep us all safe, and she didn't, and that was on her, as far as she was concerned. _

_ I know she thinks bein alone would be easier, but it's not. I don't regret falling in love, Selphie, even with the way things ended. I've got all these memories of you I'd a never had if I'd been too scared of losing you, and trust me, I was scared all the time…but I knew I couldn't let it hold me back, either. I miss you every day, but you're still with me in a way too. Everywhere I look, there's a little piece of you. I ain't gonna lie, it's taken me a long time to come to terms with everything that's happened, but there's a part of me that really believes no one's ever really _gone _if there's someone left to remember them, you know? _

_ I hope Quisty can get to that same spot one day. Hate to say it after what a jerk he's been, but Almasy's my friend now and I don't wanna see him get hurt. I just feel like he's been through enough. Heck, haven't we all? _

_ Wish you were still here, darlin. I know you could talk some sense into her. I'm keeping an eye on stuff for you, but you know I ain't good at that matchmaking crap the way you were. (Or the way you liked to think you were. I don't know if there's a heaven or anything like that, but I'd like to think there is, so if you're watchin me, stop glarin and remember some of those dates you set your friends up on.)_

_ I love you, Selphie. Always did and I always will, and I'm gonna go to my grave bein glad about it, no matter what happens._

_ Love,_

_ Irvine_


	18. Chapter Nine

**A/N: Huge thanks to all my awesome reviewers as usual, and I hope you guys aren't _too _pissed about all the nasty cliffhangers recently. ;)**

**Chapter Nine**

_ His boots raise arid puffs of gunmetal wasteland._

_ He's always fuckin' known he would end up back here; he was just hoping it would take longer._

_ His problem with this place is the goddamned _air _and the way it just clots up on your fucking tongue, tasting like leathered old fucking boot string or rot-frayed meat- can't pull it into your lungs fast or hard or good enough to really get a full breath, and just two minutes of stumbling through this shit's got him light-headed and nauseated. _

_ Worst thing isn't the nausea or the trip-hammer pounding of his fucking skull trying to come apart at the seams, though. _

_ He's alone._

_ He's always been alone and he will always _be _alone but he thinks that once upon a time- _don't fucking think like that that's a fucking lie mommy fed you moron_- there used to be this little sliver of a possibility, the proverbial shining fucking ray of hope peeking onto all that blank bleak canvas of isolation._

_ It's gone now. It used to be blue, or gold or some shit like that, but he's alone again, stumbling through this fog-_

_ And once upon a time- _fuck off he tells the voice in his head and the hope in his heart there are no once upon a times there _are _no happily ever afters-

_ "Seifer."_

_ It's not his mother calling to him, is his first realization. _

_ His second is he's not alone after all, there's a goddamned _hand _on his cheek, and he is spinning and whipping around and trying to figure out what the fuck is going on and underneath his feet the ground begins to unravel into long skeletal wisps that reach out like fingers for his ankles-_

_ -and he's sliding away._

* * *

><p><em> Your palms bleed sweat in blood-thin trickles that creep between your fingers and inside your mouth your tongue is a mummified scurf against your teeth click clack goes your puppet-hinged jaw-<em>

_ You thrust and thrust and thrust with her claws in your back and her throat in your teeth and she wants more she needs it _harder_-_

_ You are boy Seifer crouching in a closet waiting for the monsters to find you but the monster has been here all along don't you understand it is _you _boy it has always been you-_

_ The world is a fractured crumpled ruin that spins through futurepastpresent like a revolver cylinder click click clicking eternal grayscale roulette-_

_ It's _all _fucking grayscale-_

_ You are holding onto each other as futurepastpresents batter you like a hurricane prying howling fingers between your arms and the hands you reach out to her and she is being fucking _torn _from you and you're not strong enough to hold on, _fuck_-_

_ She will not let go of your fingers and it's more than you goddamned deserve-_

_ "Seifer."_

_ You don't have enough _air _to answer, something's compressing your goddamned _lungs_-_

_ "How's he doing?"_

_ "Still unconscious."_

_ "Don't worry, Quistis- he'll come around. He's been through a lot. Let him be a while longer. Maybe it's what he wants. He may have been continuously healed in D-District, but there's only so much Curaga can do; he still has…marks indicating some of the things they put him through. If it's half as bad as I suspect, the physical damage he sustained is the least of his worries."_

_ "But he will wake up?"_

_ "Yes. He will. All you need to do is be here for him when he does." _

_ Your heart and your throat and your gut all go fucking nuclear because she's _here_, she is _fucking here _and not spiraling away from you on updrafts of splintered time that rip her screaming from your goddamned _hands_-_

_ But you're not _ready _to come back yet she's going to wait for you right there are fucking _things _flickering at the edges of your consciousness and one of them is Wuss' neck at the most awkward goddamned angle you've ever seen-_

_ Did you lose someone else is it all your fault again don't even fucking _go _there-_

* * *

><p><em> He doesn't remember much about his parents except this house on a hill out in the middle of fucking nowhere, but the grass is comfortable enough and the sky's stopped pissing on him and this seems as good a place as any to rest his tired fucking eyes-<em>

_ There's a smiling woman in the house and a man leaning down to kiss her and he thinks _once upon a time Seifer Almasy had parents who loved each other how goddamned about that_ and if he squints he can see a blonde-haired boy in the front yard playing in the dirt-_

_ He's got blood under his fingernails. _

_ He's got it everywhere really, on his hands and dripping down into his eyes and plink plink pinking from the neat diamondine drill hole in his knee, but the shit under his nails is what's easiest to think about, because it's already dried to this web of brown-rust scar tissue underneath those chewed-short crescents. _

_ Always easiest to look at when it's dried- he learned that as a cadet the first time he ever got his first real injury, fucking around in the training center with a practice gun blade that almost lopped off his goddamned arm. All that red's what's scary-_

_ -reminds him of his mother's lips-_

_ The boy begins to scream something about a monster coming for him and all of a sudden the sun's gone and there's this storm-boil of contusion purple over his head wriggling like a fucking insect in the dirt-_

_ He can hear his mother's claws scrabbling around in that dirt and he's never been so fucking scared in his whole goddamned life-_

_ -hello boy hello hello hello we missed you we missed you boy did you miss us have you been a good boy-_

_ "Seifer-"_

* * *

><p><em> You've got the princess in your arms and it's all so fucking simple- just ride her off into the sunset your glory's done and over and buried in the fucking mud at your feet, asshole-<em>

_ "Seifer, I don't know if you can hear me or not but Zell…Zell told me a long time ago that while we were both in the hospital in Esthar he spent some time talking to you each day, because he'd heard before that it might help. I just want you to know that I'm here, that's all. I just want you to know that you're not alone."_

_ But maybe you fucking _are _alone did she ever think of that maybe her voice is another dream in your fractured fucking head, maybe all your friends are dead and your mother is waiting for you with a smile on her face and a noose around your dick-_

Did she ever fucking think about that-

_ Maybe you just don't want to goddamned know- maybe this skipping around through was and is and maybe and what if is better than any reality you will ever open your eyes to-_

_ Don't say Zell Dincht is dead- you don't want to _hear _it if he is-_

_ Somehow he turned himself into your best fucking friend and if he's gone too then you're fucking _done_-_

_ You just get so goddamned tired, you know? You tell yourself it's just one more fucking day, just another teetering, winded step up the fucking hill and the load's going to get lighter, the burden's going to start dwindling if you can just keep going, just for a little longer-_

_ But _fuck it _it's already _been _one more fucking day and another after that and a goddamned nother after that and you're _fucking sick of it, get it_? _

_ You slide your tongue into a thick desert-parched tangle-_

* * *

><p><em> -up against his teeth and he's got this pain in his side and this worse one in his chest and his lips are open but nothing's coming out because he needs to ask but he's so fucking <em>afraid _to know-_

_ He's not dead right someone tell him that someone tell him _none _of them are dead-_

_ It's hot in here and there's a hand prying open his mouth and he's fucking gagging he can't fucking _breathe_-_

_ With as many times as he's been broken and shot and fucking blown up he always thinks he'll get used to breathing when his lungs can't figure out how to process oxygen quite right, but it never works that way, and when he's on his knees with his handcuffed wrists out in front of him getting goddamned curb-stomped by fucking Bahamut in steel-toes he's hiccupping and coughing up what feels like a whole goddamned lung-_

_ That's what he has to go back to isn't it, no fucking thanks-_

_ The hand on his cheek is a fucking lie. Want to guess how many times he dreamed about it in that shit-stinking hole, trying to breathe around a couple of broken ribs? He doesn't even fucking know. _

_ But he's not going to fucking handjob himself into dreaming about it now, when it's too easy to pretend it's real. He'll come back to it later, when he can separate out past from present from future, when boy Seifer playing in the dirt and man Seifer spitting up teeth are two individuals that have nothing to do with one another, because boy Seifer may have been a little shit but he never did anything to deserve this-_

_ Man Seifer on the other hand…he's done some fucking shit he's not proud of. _

_ The grass under his feet goes blood-slick and something in the sky overhead whistles down like the fucking executioner's axe that took away his mother, and three feet away the earth sprays out like shrapnel and now there's an honest-to-Hyne-damned sword sticking up out of the fucking ground, getting exclaimed over by a little boy with chocolate on his face-_

_ He tells the boy to fucking forget it, more trouble than it's worth, trust him, but he can't say anything and that fat little goddamned hand closes around the hilt anyway-_

_ And the boy takes off to show his mother, dragging it behind him-_

_ -and around him loop arms that throw him screaming into the ocean, which isn't fucking right- there's no ocean here-_

* * *

><p><em> Ankle-deep waves tongue lines of acidic cold across your feet and up slide little reaching fucking hands that close like prison chains around your ankles-<em>

_ Bloat-swollen child's face rolls over beneath the waves to blink once twice again up into your eyes and there's a yank on your feet that skids them out from beneath you and drops you like a fucking rock on your ass-_

_ They're crawling out of the ocean to get you now and don't you _remember _this you _deserve _this you killed them all after all and around your ankles and wrists and neck crawl salt-puffed fingers that yank you farther out into the waves-_

_ -and inside your mouth rolls water that tastes like dead fish and blood and little bloated maggot-chewed dead girls in yellow sundresses-_

_ Go on and fucking scream, asshole- not gonna' do you any good because this is your fucking _come uppance_, get it, and it's here for you at last-_

* * *

><p><em> He's clawing fucking clawing clawing <em>clawing _toward the surface, or at least he thinks he is, except he keeps getting turned around and kicked in the head and he's got all this shit in his eyes that burns like blood or salt in an open fucking wound_- didn't they do that once too he thinks he remembers something getting poured into all his puncture marks and torn-up side flesh and red-weeping face-

_BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEPBEEPBEEPBEEPBEEP THE FUCK IS THAT NOISE-_

_ It _hurts_, little fucking _help _here he needs to claw his brain out his eyes or something, fucking _anything _that will make this noise stop-_

* * *

><p>The first jab of light through his flickering lashes slams his head back against the bed and shuts the fuckers right the hell up all over again, and it's not until he hears Kadowaki's familiar maternal clucking that he realizes that noise is his heart monitor going out of control, jumping all around like a spastic fucking bird.<p>

His second hesitant attempt is just a slit that lets in a little sliver of blue and blonde leaning over him, too close, and he's about to not mind when he suddenly realizes he's not sure it's Quistis-

And now his eyelids jack themselves open all the way, and you know, Zell Dincht's face is the most beautiful fucking thing he's ever seen, right now.

* * *

><p><em> -rinoa are you ok rinoa are you still there say something rinoa-<em>

"That air's coming back."

_-well just hold on rinoa hold on keep talking to her don't let go ok just hold on _please _rinoa just hold on-_

"I don't know if I can. It…it makes…me…sleepy…"

* * *

><p>Balamb Garden<p>

Balamb

Four Days Later

"So these jerkoffs are tryin' to follow us in their truck, right, but they can't keep up with my driving-"

"'Cause it's like trying to copy the maneuvers of an epileptic while they're going into a grand mal behind the wheel," Irvine cut in, and Laguna snickered, leaning back in his chair and crossing his arms.

"_Anyway_, Quisty throws this grenade at 'em and WA-BAM, the whole thing blows and sends it spinning out of control right into our truck- flipped the whole thing over they hit that hard, and Kinneas and Quisty are the only ones still conscious, so they're trying to drag me an' Seifer away from the wreckage and-"

"Where is Seifer, anyway?" Kiros interrupted, flicking one of the beads in his hair. Zell looked up from his elaborate hand motions with a frown, reaching around to scratch the back of his head.

Ellone smothered a smile behind her hand.

"He took off a couple a' days ago; Kadowaki said he made it out pretty well, considering. He had a lot of high-level healing spells still burning off in his system, so a Curaga drip for a few days patched him up pretty good. He's back home; went and saw him the other day, but the guy's a little tight-lipped right now. Had a beer with him and then left; he wasn't sayin' much anyway. Get the feelin' he went through some pretty bad shit in D-district." Irvine reached up to tip back a hat that wasn't there anymore, his frown wrinkling up the pale patchwork down of his new eyebrows. "Anyway, I'm sure Quisty's with him. She'll get him to talk, or she'll distract him with her feminine wiles until he's ready to. Ladies are experts at that kinda' thing."

"I'm tryin' to tell a story here, man."

"By all means, go ahead," Laguna offered with an expansive sweep of his hand, following all the way through the motion to smooth the sheet around Ellone with a tender little smile that she returned, reaching out briefly to squeeze his fingers.

"So we're sitting ducks, right? But it turns out that thanks to my amazing driving skills-"

"You know he keeps bringing this up to impress you, right," Irvine drawled, slanting a nod toward Ellone.

"Dude, _shut up _and let me tell the friggin' story! So the truck flips over and we're all stuck and the other truck's on fire and the flames keep getting closer and closer-"

"The other truck wasn't on fire."

"Stop _interrupting_!" Zell snapped, leaning across Ellone's legs to swat irritably at his friend, who fended off his hand with an easy snap of his wrist. "So whatever, maybe the truck wasn't on fire but we still had all these Galbadian assbutts up our holes and-"

"Hey!" Laguna barked, jerking his chin toward Ellone. "Watch your mouth, you little craphead."

"Uncle Laguna, I'm certain that I-"

"Don't make excuses for him, sweetheart; if he's going to talk in front of ladies, then he needs to do it respectfully."

She threw up her hands in mock exasperation and Irvine sneaked her a wink that made her smile, both eyes crinkling up in a way she had not felt for some time. "Go on, Zell. Everyone, stop teasing him. Or else we'll be here all day."

"Man, you too, Ellone?" he whined, slumping down in his chair and crossing his arms. "Fine. Guess none of you want to hear the end to my _extremely exciting _story, but that's your friggin' loss."

"We already know the end," Kiros pointed out.

"You're sitting here yammering at us like it's going out of style, aren't you?" Laguna added, tipping his head to one side in a gunshot pop of a neck stretch. "I'm not gonna' lie-I'm glad you kids are all safe and sound and back in one piece, but I kinda' wish the Galbadians had done something about your mouth. Isn't there some kinda' permanent Silence spell or something?"

"That's not very nice, Uncle Laguna."

"Come on, Ellone, honey, we're all sitting here thinking it."

"Hey, you wanna' go, old man?" Zell's long smooth leap pushed his chair out from beneath him with a sharp knife-squeal of an exit, and both fists came up to shiver warningly in front of his face.

Irvine rolled his eyes and tipped his chair back onto two legs. "Sit down before ya' hurt yourself, idget."

"Kiros and I have to go, anyway," Laguna said, levering himself out of his chair with a groan. Got some stuff to go over with Squall."

"Aw, you're just scared, old man." Zell dropped his hands and collapsed loosely backward into his seat, arching his back into a fireworks crackle of a spine pop. "Come see me if you got the balls."

Laguna cuffed him across the side of the head as he leaned over the bed to embrace Ellone with his other arm, gently pecking her cheek as he pulled back. "We'll be back later. Kick him out if you need to sleep, ok?"

"He's fine."

"Don't know about that," Irvine mumbled, setting his chair back down on all four legs with a thump. "'Fine's' never really been a word that comes to mind when I'm thinking about Dincht here."

"You're just jealous."

"Of what? Your debonair way with the ladies?" He slapped both hands down on his knees and pushed off them, easing himself to his feet. "Well, I'm gonna' give you kids some alone time. Gotta' take off before the doc gets back and wants to run more tests on me. Told her I'm fine, but Hyne-damn that's a pushy lady. Don't do anything I wouldn't."

"I'd say that leaves a lot of options open," Ellone said with a smile that made Zell flush, and she could hear Irvine still chuckling as the door hissed shut behind him.

"So, uh…whatdaya' wanna' do?"

"I'm tired of being here," she replied quietly, tipping her head back up against the pillow to blink at the cream-tiled ceiling overhead, waterspotted. "Everything's been fine for the last few days, but Dr. Kadowaki wants to keep me just a little longer for observation. But Zell- I'm tired of lying here in this bed. I've been here for weeks."

"Yeah, it sucks- Irvine complained about the same thing. But you know, Kadowaki said that if you did ok she could probably release you in a few days or so, and that we could all just keep a close eye on you."

"I'd like to get out of here now," she told him softly, sliding her head down the edge of the pillow to meet his eyes, owl-wide underneath the gel-tousled spikes of his hair.

"Are you asking me to-"

"Please, Zell. Take me out of here. Just into town or something- just for a few hours? Please? I feel fine now."

He scratched his head, sitting up straight and frowning. "I dunno, Ellone. What if something happens?"

"I trust you to take care of me."

She stretched her hand out to touch his with a smile, and man, that was all he needed, you know? Seifer would have called him a pussy, but see _him _resist those big soft eyes like they were friggin' nothing-

He curled his fingers around hers, letting his thumb drift hesitantly across her knuckles, healing slits of fingernail indentations fading into inflamed pink around the edges.

"Please," she whispered.

_Shit._

* * *

><p>She stretched out beside him on the sand close enough to touch, and up against his chest his heart slammed a jackhammer rhythm he couldn't quite figure out how to steady.<p>

In the sky above them, sunset painted layers of titian into the clouds, and the hand on the beach beside him swept a long smooth arc up toward his own, tentatively grazing his palm. "Do you think anyone can see us?" she whispered, slipping her fingers through his.

"Nah. The docks should block us from anyone standing up top. Don't worry- Kadowaki's gonna' be mad at me when we head back, not you."

"I'm sorry. I didn't want to get you into trouble."

"It's ok. I don't mind. This is nice, you know?" It was more than nice, it was a whole damn three-piece orchestra in his chest and a sunburn tingling in his hand, but he didn't mention that to her. "I uh…I missed you."

He could hear the smile in her voice even if he was too scared shitless to look over and see it. "I missed you too, Zell. I, um…there's somewhere I'd like to go with you, actually."

"Ok," he said, keeping his eyes on the sky. "I'll take you wherever you want, Ellone."

A sudden shifting in the sand beside him slid a small hump of dune out from underneath his back, and suddenly he had all of her pressed up against him, hip to hip and chest to chest, and he felt both his hands screw themselves rigidly down into the beach beneath him.

She kissed the edge of his collarbone very softly and then slid one hand through the hair at the nape of his neck, angling his head around toward her mouth.

His hands drifted hesitantly up to cup her shoulder blades, his lips parting against hers in a long open-mouthed kiss that sent little shivers down her back where his fingers puckered up the skin underneath her shirt.

"Do you think Irvine went home?" she whispered against his lips, trailing her mouth across his cheek to kiss his tattoo.

Her hips shifted up against his and shorted out his brain. "Uh…probably."

"Then…" Her cheeks had gone bright red, warm as his own. "Do you think…do you think we could get a hotel room?" She shifted again, and he re-adjusted her with a hiss, pushing just slightly up on her slender hips to lift her off his dick, which was trying to do all his thinking for him. "I don't think anyone will be looking for me- I'm sure they'll know I went off with you. They'll just wait for us to get back, don't you think?"

"Prob-ably. Uh…I need you to move."

"Am I hurting you?"

"No, uh…look, parts of me…never mind. Ellone, are you sure you want to…?"

"Yes," she said, tentatively pushing her hips back into his.

* * *

><p>He closes the door of their room behind him and sets the keycard carefully down on a mirror-polished desk off to one side, stuffing both hands into his pockets.<p>

All around him are angles of plush carpeting and quaint flower-painted wallpaper, eye-searingly bright.

It is the first time he has ever actually been inside one of the rooms at the Balamb Hotel.

He is not sure what to do with anything, his hands or thoughts or mouth, so he does and says and thinks nothing. Across the room from him, she sits down on the bed and folds both hands in her lap, and she looks everywhere that is not him, smiling vaguely.

"Uh," he says brilliantly, combing one hand back through his hair.

He can hear the smile in her voice when she speaks at last. "You don't have to stand all the way over there, you know."

"I'm good!" he barks; it tapers off into a high-pitched squeak that brings him all the way back to puberty, and Seifer's cruel impressions.

He looks away for just a moment, toward the bathroom he can just sort of see through the cracked-open door, and it is all the time she needs to cross the room and bring both hands softly up around his elbows, her head against his chest.

He stiffens as she sinks into him, but a smile and both arms around his waist unlock his muscles and arc his own arms tentatively up to fold carefully around her hips, and now they are nose to nose and he is not sure what to say or do next, because what if it's _wrong _or she doesn't like it-

She pulls him toward the bed by the loops in his pants and he stumbles gracelessly along behind her, and when his knees impact the mattress he flops face-first forward with a cut-off gurgle of a cry-

And she's _laughing_- please Hyne just let him curl up here and die-

Ellone takes her place on the bed beside him, one elbow underneath her and that same soft smile on her face that makes his heart do laps in his chest, and when he opens his mouth to say something that will probably be stupid, she leans forward to kiss him. A hand in his shirt and a short sharp yank rolls him over on top of her, and now he does not have the breath to say anything at all: he runs his hands up over her sides, across her shoulders and into her hair, and when a hard arch of her back presses her hips up into his, he pulls away panting. "Ellone, I've never…I've never done this before."

Underneath him with her hair fanned out around her face, she is so beautiful he can barely even _think_- or maybe that's her crotch pressed up against his that's so Hyne-damned distracting- and he runs his thumb over her chin and slants himself forward to kiss her chastely on the forehead, pulling back just far enough to replace his lips with his cheek.

"I can tell." The smile has not left her voice.

"Well, what if I'm…like, _bad _at it?"

She tilts his face up off her forehead with both hands on his cheeks, and that smile reaches all the way to her eyes, and now something in his throat coils hotter and tighter and harder, and he cannot swallow around it.

She might be smiling and laughing beneath him right now, but something is wrong with her, something is coming to take her away from him one day, and for a long time he has to brace himself with both hands on either side of her head, blinking hard. He just…he doesn't want to think about it, you know? He _can't _think about it. Nothing wrong with pretending, right? Nothing wrong with convincing himself that they are going to grow old together the way he always thought Matron and Cid would, or Irvine or Selphie, or Rinoa and Squall-

But no one gets the happy ending in this world, right? In this tailspin of an existence set into motion long before any of them could even begin to understand the repercussions of it, six little boys and girls who chased fireflies and played hide and go seek under the watchful eye of a mother who loved them got chosen by fate or destiny or some stupid crap like that, and it never let them go.

_Would _never let them go.

It did not reward good deeds or care about first loves, and it did not hand out happily ever afters just because a long, long time ago those six little boys and girls believed in them.

He knows this.

He _knows _this.

But in this brightly-painted room that smells of lavender and her skin, he wants to believe- he wants so _badly _to believe- that he's going to beat the odds, hawk a big ol' spit wad right into the face of that bitch Fate, that all of them are going to come through this alive and happy and in each other's arms, where they're supposed to be-

He wants Selphie and Rinoa and Matron back, and he just wants everyone to be _happy_. It shouldn't be _too much to ask_.

"Zell?" There is a frown between her eyebrows and a faint downward tug of her lips, and he uses his thumb to smooth them both out. "What's wrong? Don't be nervous- you're not going to be bad at it."

"Have you ever done this before?" he blurts out, because he does not want to know, but it hurts less than all the other contemplations swirling together in his head.

"Yes," she tells him quietly. "Once."

He can tell by the look on her face that she knows he is crestfallen, and the hand that has fallen back down to the sheets underneath them goes back to his cheek. "There was one other guy…he had political aspirations, and I was too stupid to see it. Uncle Laguna probably had him executed afterward." She smiles softly. "But you're going to be my most important one- that's enough, isn't it? And," she gently kisses the point of his chin, "at least we're not the blind leading the blind, right?"

He tries to shift the shape of his lips and the furrow of his brow, but he can tell it's not working.

"Zell…I love you. If I'd…if I'd ever thought…I wish I had waited. It was a long time ago- I was young and stupid. I can't take it back. I'm sorry."

He sits back on his heels with a sigh and rakes both hands up through his hair, and he cannot quite meet her eyes. "Don't say you're sorry, Ellone. It's stupid, anyway- I just…never mind." He shakes his head with a frown.

She props herself upright on both elbows, and reaches out a slender hand for the collar of his shirt, and her gentle tug sprawls him forward across her once more, their faces half an inch apart. The heat in her cheeks is the same intensity as the flush in his own, but she is smiling anyway, and when she brings both legs slowly up to hook them loosely around his waist, all her hesitation is gone. "Why don't you make me forget about him?" she teases softly.

It is all fumbling and awkwardness, from here on out.

On his end, at least.

His hands at the zipper of her skirt shake like a first year bringing down their first T-rexaur, and when he pulls her skirt down across her thighs far enough to see her panties, he feels a little like throwing up, he is that nervous.

She slides her own shirt off over her head and then does the same with his, and now they are bare chest to bare chest, because she did not have enough time to dig around for a bra during her hasty retreat from Garden. Her breasts are small and soft and perky as hell, and he makes an involuntary little noise in the back of his throat when she arches into him, sliding his hands around to dig his fingers into her back as he kisses his way down her throat to her collarbone.

He pauses as his mouth drifts lower; she sets both hands lightly on top of his head to encourage him and now he's got one breast in his hand and the other up against his lips, and when he pokes out his tongue experimentally, she drops her head back and lets out the same involuntary little noise in the back of her own throat. He tongues her nipple into his mouth and arcs his thumb across the other, and now her hand grips a handful of his hair, and pulls; it hurts in a way that's sort of oddly nice, and for just a moment he forgets to be shy as he lowers her back down to the bed.

And then one hand stretches shyly up to brush the front of his pants, and suddenly he is stammering like a moron all over again, something even he does not understand, and she puts a finger to his lips as she traps his zipper between thumb and forefinger and tugs hard enough to pull his pants halfway down his narrow hips.

He kicks them off without letting go of her.

By the time he gets to her panties, his hands are shaking again; she leans her head back against the pillow and smiles hazily up at him, lifting her hips to help him and holy _Hyne_, he needs to take a deep breath-

He is inside her in three slow, careful thrusts, because the slight white-pinched strain on her face warns him that he's going to need to keep himself in check for this first penetration, even if certain parts of his anatomy are screaming for him to just hammer one home.

His third pump seats him all the way, and for just a moment he stays like that, breathing hard with his face pressed into the side of her neck, because one wrong twitch is going to spill him over the edge, already. He's _not _going to be a three pump chump- Seifer will find out somehow, and then he'll never hear the end of it.

She digs her fingers into his ass, and all his determination almost doesn't matter.

Everything is tight and warm and the _friction_- oh _shit_-

Watch all the porn you like, it can't even begin to compare to the real thing.

When she starts to thrust her hips up to meet his he almost loses it again- if she would just _slow down_, for just a second-

But he doesn't want her to- this feels so Hyne friggin' amazing he is suddenly not sure he can stop at all, even if it means lasting a pathetically unimpressive three minutes, and now he begins to thrust back just as hard, wadding up the sheets underneath him in both his fists as he kisses her. It's all sloppy and out of control, even teeth to teeth a couple of times, because he cannot be close enough, he cannot stay like this long enough- there is a whole reality he doesn't want to come back to waiting for them after this is all over, and he's going to make it last as long as it can-

His body's got other ideas, and in one long headrush moment that smears galactic black pinwheeling across his eyes, he is done; three more thrusts tightens her around him even more, and against his neck her breathing goes ragged, her fingernails carving lines of fire down his back.

They lie in a sweaty tangled heap together for a long time afterward, his head pillowed on her shoulder and her hand combing his hair, and it is not until afterward, in the shower where they spend a long time just standing with their arms around one another underneath the spray, that he tells her what he has been too chicken shit to say for all this time, and what she has been waiting to hear.

She smiles up at him with shower water or tears in her eyes- he cannot tell which, and she does not let him wonder for very long: they are here to keep their minds off what this means and how long they both know it is not going to last.

When she goes to her knees in front of him, he has to brace one hand against the side of the stall to keep from falling over.

* * *

><p>Woman on top had its advantages, most notably Quistis' tits bouncing up and down as he fucked her.<p>

He was too goddamned tired for any other position right now.

It was a bad night, to make the understatement of the year; normally he fucked her as hard and fast and furiously as they both could manage- none of that lovemaking shit for him; it was all about humping each other's brains out- but tonight he kept his arms draped around her back and his hips in a tightly-controlled back-and-forth that kept everything burning slowly but steadily, and he let her do most of the work.

Sex wipes out everything, he read in a book once. Or a magazine. Shit, maybe it was in a porn he watched.

Whatever.

Point was, you could make a blanket statement about fucking anything, get a bunch of yammering idiots to bob their heads like fucking dolls bobbling on a dashboard, and somewhere, someone was waiting to upend your truth on its fucking head.

Thing was, for people like him, sex didn't wipe out anything: it crystallized.

Freeze frame, the electric white flash of lightning turning a room into actinic sun glare in the middle of the night, that moment when, for just a second, everything became still and stark and etched with shadows along the edges- whatever the fuck you wanted to call it.

It didn't used to be this way for him.

It used to be everything that blanket statement promised him: some animal grunting in the dark and heat and wet and tension around his dick.

It used to be about not knowing or caring about a girl's name, as long as she knew what to do with her hands and her mouth.

And then his mother came along and changed everything, and just left him behind to pick up all the pieces of himself, scattered around like that fucking egg from the story she used to tell him as a kid.

Sometimes, he still froze up.

Sometimes, it wasn't even about his mother.

Sometimes, when he wanted to disappear into her for just the elastic fucking moment he always goddamned wished would just stretch and stretch forever, he instead watched shadows unfold from the walls and reach out toward him with fingertips that ended in drill bit points of fingertips.

He watched men with steel-toed boots and smiling blood-painted lips stand over him like his mother staring down at him coiled up in his bed.

He watched his old Posse stumble through smears of swollen gray haze, coming apart at the seams to show him decay-puffed maggots.

And he just held onto her.

Like he did now.

Like he wanted to do forever.

When they both finished, he kept her clutched up against his chest, stroking her hair.

They hadn't yet talked about what he'd asked her in D-district.

The words coiled up like wires in his fucking throat, strangling him.

For a long time, she lay stretched out above him with her sweat-drenched skin going cool against his and the clock on the wall over his bed winding down and down and down toward midnight, like his heart in his chest slowing to match the rhythm of her own pulse banging up against him.

"Are you ok?" she asked him at last, propping her chin on his sternum to look up at him.

It was a dumb fucking question, and she knew it. But there was always going to be this part of her that wanted to fix anything broken, that wanted to smooth out all the cracks, tidy up the fucking shards-

He had a lot of goddamned cracks.

He kissed the top of her head.

"No," he said.

He could be honest with her now, even if he couldn't talk about waking up in an infirmary thinking Zell Dincht was dead, even if he could never fucking hope to describe just wanting to curl up inside his own mind and stay there forever.

At least inside your mind you could remind yourself it was all just a bunch of made-up shit, nightmare gibberish that could be peeled back and rolled up and put away if you concentrated hard enough.

Couldn't peel back or roll up or put away reality.

She reached up to touch his face.

She didn't say anything.

It was all just layers of understanding between them now, when to shut the hell up and when to push, and he was not in the fucking mood for sharing and caring right now.

He stared up at the paint-peeling ceiling over their heads, and the wires in his throat tightened like a fucking corkscrew chiseling all the way through to his lungs. "Do you like this place?" he blurted out suddenly enough to lift her head and swing it around toward him again, and he cleared his throat and dug his fingers into the bed underneath him and stepped off the goddamned cliff.

"We could get a different place."

"What do you mean?"

He glared toward the far corner of the room, not looking at her. "You said yes. When I asked you-" He cut himself off because now he could see something faint and flickering and edged with caution in her eyes. "_What_?" he snapped. "You just tell me that to give me a fucking reason to keep breathing in there?"

She looked startled now. "You're saying that was your reason for not…for not giving up?"

He rolled her off him onto her side of the bed and swung both feet over the side of the mattress, getting his hand into his hair and tangling it up in the fucking roots like that was his anchor and if he let go he was going to let all this _feeling _just come boiling fucking out of him: tightness in his chest and across his throat and something hot and roiling and thundering that tasted like hatred smoking his heart-

Not hatred.

He didn't hate her, even standing here with both legs through his pants and his back a rigid goddamned barrier between them. "What the fuck else do you think I had to look forward to in there? They stuck me in a metal cage with spikes. They _drilled holes in my fucking knee caps_, for shit's sake."

He zipped up his pants and spun back around to face her, crossing both arms over his chest and leaning one hip up against the dresser to his right, glowering down at his feet.

Fuckers were webbed in constellations of scar tissue, just like the rest of him.

He'd like to look in the mirror one day and find just one bare unblemished inch of flesh, pale and whole and flawless.

"I didn't ask you to marry me for shits and giggles. Are you saying that was why you said yes?"

"No, of course not." She sat up with the sheet wrapped around her bare torso, like he hadn't already seen everything underneath it. "I just didn't…I wasn't sure you meant it."

"Why the fuck would you think I didn't mean it?" he snapped.

She tucked her knees primly underneath her and reached over the side of the bed for the crumpled pile of her clothing, taking her sweet fucking time about it.

He wanted to reach back in time and slap the fumbling fucking words right out of his mouth: just because her fucking highness had deigned to date him didn't mean she wanted to spend the rest of her life with him- how the goddamned hell could he ever have even _thought _he had a fucking _chance_, offering her a future that would probably never even exist, for people like them-

What did he have to give her: a shattered keloid-rippled soldier fresh off the battlefield and a cramped little fucking house that smelled like fish, on days he left the windows open-

He could be more than that, if it meant he got to keep her. He could give the middle finger to this life that bogged him down like fucking shit lapping up around his boots- he didn't _want _it anymore, didn't she get it- he wanted her and a home and the fucking cowboy and Wuss doing normal shit three doors down and not getting their asses shot off for a cause they were all too tired to give a shit about anymore-

"Seifer, do you really want to-"

"Yes," he interrupted her, instantly. "Fuck Garden. When the war's over, I'm done. I'm out. I've handed over enough of my life to that fucking place. We've had our whole fucking lives mapped out for us, Quistis, since we were kids. And it all turned into shit. I was a dumbass who wanted to beat up monsters and save princesses. I thought I was going to be some kind of fucking hero, have people fall all over me, tell stories about me- and you know what I want now? I want a normal life. Work on the docks. Be a fucking fisherman or something."

"You're horrible at fishing," she said, smiling gently.

"I don't care if anyone knows who I am anymore- I just want to be one of those fucking idiots going off to work in the morning, where the worst shit I'm going to have to put up with is a copier out of ink, or listening to some dumb old bat talk about what her sex life was like twenty years ago."

"The war might not be over for years."

"Then years from now, I'm going to quit and be some stupid nine-to-five fuck like everyone else." He shifted his hip off the dresser, transferred all his weight to the other foot, passed it back: back and forth and back and forth, like he had to take a goddamned piss, but excuse _him _for being so fucking nervous with that steady, logical fucking instructor look on her face.

She was going to argue with him.

She was going to say no.

There was already a hole in his fucking heart, eating itself wider and wider and wider: if she said no, he'd break something.

He'd put his foot through the wall and his fist through the mirror.

He'd splinter this whole goddamned house and everything inside of it down to kindling, break it up into the little pieces his chest was separating itself into, and tomorrow Wuss or the cowboy or Quistis herself would come pick him up and put him back together, and the day after that or the one after that he'd smash himself apart all over again.

"I believe you."

"La di fucking da for you," he snarled.

She sighed and reached for her glasses, sitting on the nightstand beside her half of the bed, the one he never slept on because it didn't feel right taking up that little corner of his life that was supposed to belong to her. "I'm saying I believe _in _you, Seifer. I think…if you put your mind to it, you could even be a fishermen. Though for the sake of all the fishermen you are going to absolutely horrify until you get the hang of it, I would suggest another career path."

"This is fucking _funny _to you?"

"No, of course not. I'm not laughing at you, I just…what are you asking me? To quit?"

"To go out and live a fucking life that doesn't come from some orders. We've been following orders our whole fucking _lives_, Trepe."

"You've never followed any orders, Seifer."

He went on, gathering steam, ignoring her. "Garden lubes up and we bend over and we take it because that's what we were taught to do, because we never had any other choice or another place to go. And you know what? I'm fucking sick of killing people. I'm fucking sick of waking up wondering who's gonna' die today and is it going to be me or is it going to be you or Zell or Irvine- I'm fucking _sick of it_."

"I understand," she said softly, like a trainer trying to coax an animal back into its cage, and he felt something coil up tighter and tighter inside of him, because he didn't want her goddamned _understanding _right now, he wanted a little fucking _agreement_-

He wanted to be enough for her.

He wanted her to let go of all her orders and her papers and her regimental rows and rows of uniforms in her closet and students in her class, and he wanted her to grow old next to him on a front porch somewhere with her feet in his lap and her head on his shoulder.

He _wanted to be enough for her_.

"You _don't _understand," he snapped.

"Then explain it to me. What, exactly, do you want from me?"

He squeezed his eyes shut, tipped his head back, shifted his weight back and forth and back and forth, like a fucking pendulum in a clock.

"I want you to quit with me. I want to get married. I want to have a fucking house together, and I want neither one of us to fucking die until we're old and wrinkled and my dick doesn't stand up anymore."

The words came down like a hammer between them.

* * *

><p>She is thinking about freedom.<p>

In the morning, she will get up whenever she wants, not because the sky is tinted just faintly rose and it is time for her five-mile run.

She will shuffle leisurely around a sun-soaked kitchen putting coffee on the pot and lean back into his arms when he loops them around her from behind, and in the evenings she will not grade papers or overlook admission forms or sign off on KIA notices that will be mailed out the following day to grieving families-

She will lie next to him with a book in her lap and her head on his shoulder, and she will never do anything she does not want to ever again.

She will never again clean half-moons of brown-rust blood from underneath her fingernails.

She will never again watch another neck stump bleed out at her feet.

She will never again place the smooth-oiled barrel of a firearm to a temple already starred in GSR, dots upon dots upon dots of black-flaking residue that cannot hide half-exposed brain matter, twitching and shivering and refusing to die.

Something she was never told during her admission to Garden: soldiers are captives.

All their orders and regulations and rules are manacles on their ankles, keeping them all in perfect lockstep unison.

She has never tried to break this eternally clanking chain gang; for years and years and years, she has never even questioned it. Where will she go and what will she do and who will she be, if she leaves behind this home that embraced her when no one else wanted her, this facility with its tidal flux of incoming students and rows of smiling young faces-

Garden put her back together and built her a spine that would not bend or bow or break, and inside its walls and along its corridors and buried behind all its layers and layers of military order she learned how to never be helpless again.

She was taught how to turn rejection into mindless driving purpose.

She is still grateful. She will always _be _grateful-

And yet.

This man with his heart in his eyes and the sweaty hands he has slipped around hers, sometime in the interim between his outburst and the eternal stretching silence that is the only answer she has given him so far-

He is making her think.

She cannot _stop _thinking.

She is thinking about living for herself, and for him.

She is thinking about waking up beside him, forever, and getting up when she wants to and playing music as loud as she wants, and dancing across hardwood floors in her socks-

She is thinking about being _normal_, about dying old and content and asleep in her bed-

She looks down at his hands and back to his face, and inside her chest her heart is thumping thumping _thumping_, like it is trying to pound out an answer across her tongue and between her lips-

She wants this.

She _wants _this.

"Trepe-"

His voice is all clogged up like he is trying to speak around something in his throat, and she leans in without thinking and seals his lips shut around whatever it is he is trying to tell her, and around her hands his fingers tighten like he is afraid she is going to pull away too soon.

And she does.

It is always too soon, in this world they live in, this existence that hinges on an hour, a second, a heartbeat, a gunshot.

And she says simply: "Yes. Ok."

And his whole face changes.

* * *

><p>She is all the way back at Garden in her dorm room the next morning before reality hits her, while she is standing in front of her closet picking out the blouse she will slip on underneath her SeeD jacket.<p>

This is all she knows: this room around her with the faintly throbbing monitor and the folded-back sheets on the bed and the soldier-straight lines of her shoes, all pointing the same way.

He can be anything he wants to; he has never followed their rules anyway, never tried to fit himself into boxes or contort himself into their mold.

All she has ever done is contort and fit and cram and cram and cram, until she is exactly the shape and size and disposition they need her to be.

* * *

><p>Jealousy is a little worm inside of him, eating everything. He feels it all the time, every time he spots them in the hallway smiling like there is no swelling ocean tide of hurrying class-bound students pressing in on them from all sides, like there is only the two of them alone in a universe constructed just for them-<p>

He remembers what it used to be like, having the same thing. He remembers staring down at Rinoa like that and holding her in the dark and sitting at his desk after a long day with her head on his shoulder and her smile lighting up his room and his heart and his mood-

And he remembers Quistis Trepe's eyes going all the way through him like knives when he tells her that Seifer Almasy is not worth saving.

This is the truth he allows himself to see when he is hazed with sleep and his guards are down and missing Rinoa is a physical pain inside of him:

He does not hate Almasy. He does not, really, deep down, want him to die. That moment in the secret area with Quistis- just a fleeting, burning appearance of that worm, gnawing gnawing gnawing away at the part of him that wants her to be happy more than he wants to not be alone.

The truth is, he does not want her to lose Seifer, not if it will devastate her, but he is only human, even if they all need and want and expect him to be just a machine, just a vaguely man-shaped automaton running on pure pre-programmed determination, holding together all the cracks and flaws that are the gradual day-by-day collapse of Garden.

He is clinging onto this place with his fingertips.

The war is a hurricane yanking at his feet.

None of them see it, of course, because he does not want them to. This thin façade of control he wears like a mask and sheds at the end of the day, alone in his room, is the only thing he has left now. This mantle of authority he donned so reluctantly is a yoke that is slowly, one day at a time, breaking him down and bending him to its will and resigning him to a life of eternal suffocation, but it is the only thing he has to get up for in the morning.

It feels like layers of ocean wave folding down over his head, ceaselessly crashing and crashing and crashing, until down is up and up is down, until he has been hammered and choked into a submission he can only stoically shoulder and bear, or die fighting.

He is too tired to fight anything anymore, this war or the way he feels about her.

He thinks about all of this in between penning notes on his desk and sneaking glances at her, across the office from him and bent over a filing cabinet.

None of this will show on his face, of course: he can feel the blank marble masquerade he has carved for himself fold itself down and tuck itself neatly into place over all the fractures that construct him, a jigsaw man sitting the throne of a crumbling kingdom.

He understands why it is Cid who is slowly, one day at a time, replacing himself as Adan's father, even if he goes nuclear to the very core, just thinking of that man tending his wife's grave and raising his next batch of little orphan soldiers and kissing Squall's son on the forehead, because he cannot be there to do it himself.

On the worst of days, the rage trickles all the way down into his toes and tingles in his fingertips and crackles in his jaw, and he thinks that this is what it must be like to be Seifer, every day of his life.

He taps some papers on the edge of his desk and clears his throat, and she looks up with a polite distraction of a smile and a file folder in one hand, her glasses slanted just slightly off-center on the end of her nose. He watches her poke them back into place and cracks his knuckles and then his neck, one alleviating, vertebral pop at a time: a firecracker chain like evenly-placed gunshots, the soundtrack he charts his entire life by.

Sometimes, when he is alone and particularly sentimental and miserable, he wonders what his life might sound like if he had never left the orphanage at all.

Thundering in-tide and fluttering sheets and children hurling hide-and-go-seek rules across the dunes at one another, like the words are knives they can pin uncooperative participants underneath-

"Squall?"

He jerks his head up and his eyes around to her face, and layered underneath her infinite patience he can see wariness filtering in around the edges, and his heart flops like a beached fish going limp, because he knows it is for him, and the way he acted in the Secret Area, but isn't it all right for him to be impulsive just once in a while in his whole damn ordered little _life_-

"Yeah?"

The file folder is open in her hands, and now it does not matter if he took too long to respond, if she can see past this carefully pieced-together marble masquerade he takes a moment each day to don before walking out to meet all those hopeful little faces believing in and counting on and _pressuring _him until he can barely even _stand _it anymore-

"Quistis?"

He is half out of his chair before he even realizes his legs have unfolded underneath him, and he watches his knuckles flare white and her cheeks even whiter, and suddenly his throat is a garrote, sealing him shut all the way down to his chest. "Quistis?" he repeats, like he thinks she is only not answering him because she didn't hear him the first time he said her name.

There is a pounding in his head and his chest and his throat, like his heart has migrated to all of these places at once, and now he is one single synchronized pulse that brings back that orphanage by the sea, thunderheads of deafening surf that layer themselves one on top of another on top of another-

He can't hear anything else.

* * *

><p><strong>Medical File #38576, Cadet S. Leonhart, ID #57333268<strong>

**Physician: Ellen Kadowaki, MD**

**Patient Identification: Squall Leonhart is a 10-year-old male here for a basic mental eval upon admission. **

**Reason For Treatment/Interim History: General mental health evaluation. **

**Mental Status Exam: Pt. presents appropriately dressed and groomed and does not complain of any ongoing issues. He is brought here personally by Cid, who acted as patient's caregiver from the age of five until present. Cid reports no obvious mental issues. He does note pt. is very anti-social and rather shy. **

**Treatment Recommendations: Cid requests pt. be medically cleared for GF junctioning as soon as possible. He informs me that it is unfortunately necessary that the boy forget his childhood at the orphanage, if he is to properly perform at this facility. **

**Comments: Pt. is very quiet and responds to any questions I ask him with only a word or two. He is very stoic. He is a polite, neat little boy who cooperates with this exam without protesting at all. I will recommend him for immediate GF junctioning; we will set him up with one of the lower-level GFs, to hopefully avoid any severe side effects. **

* * *

><p><strong>Medical File #22355, Cadet Z. Dincht, ID #39001854<strong>

**Physician: Ellen Kadowaki, MD**

**Patient Identification: Zell Dincht is a 13-year-old male here for a basic mental eval upon admission. **

**Reason For Treatment/Interim History: General mental health evaluation. **

**Mental Status Exam: Pt. presents appropriately dressed and groomed and does not complain of any ongoing issues. He is very energetic, answers all my questions and then keeps talking until I re-direct him; he talks about his mother a lot and how he once used the sign by the car rental place in Balamb to do a bunch of chin-ups. **

**Treatment Recommendations: Zell Dincht is another of the original orphans, and Cid requests he be medically cleared for GF junctioning asap as well. **

**Comments: Pt. is again extremely energetic, running all over the place- I can barely get him to sit still long enough to ask him how he is feeling about his admission to Garden. (Very excited, apparently.) I will get him set up for GF junctioning as soon as we are done here, again with one of the low level Guardian Forces in an attempt to bypass any serious side effects. **

* * *

><p><strong>Medical File #99187, Cadet Q. Trepe, ID #67510334<strong>

**Physician: Ellen Kadowaki, MD **

**Patient Identification: Quistis Trepe is a 10-year-old female here for a basic mental eval upon admission. **

**Reason For Treatment/Interim History: General mental health evaluation. **

**Mental Status Exam: Pt. presents appropriately dressed and groomed and does not complain of any ongoing issues. She is quiet but cooperative, appears to be a little shy, but smiles when I attempt to make her comfortable. **

**Treatment Recommendations: Quistis Trepe is one of the original orphans, and is to be medically cleared for GF junctioning. **

**Comments: Pt. seems to be a very bright young lady, and takes an interest in some of the specimens and samples I have sitting around the infirmary. She is very polite, but curious. Any questions I ask her are answered respectfully and promptly. I think she will make an excellent candidate for GF junctioning, but we will of course ease her in as well. **

* * *

><p><strong>Medical File #56893, Cadet S. Almasy, ID #38771599<strong>

**Physician: Ellen Kadowaki, MD.**

**Patient Identification: Seifer Almasy is a 10-year-old male here for a basic mental eval upon admission. **

**Reason For Treatment/Interim History: General mental health evaluation. **

**Mental Status Exam: Pt. presents appropriately dressed and groomed and does not complain of any ongoing issues. He is brought in by Cid as well, very surly-looking, and has a blackened left eye; the bruise is faint, although still noticeable. When I ask him what happened, he grins and tells me I should see the other guy. He answers my questions, but not without some prompting from myself as well as Cid, and he tends to pop off with very smart answers. Cid notes that he is very aggressive, tends toward bullying, and had trouble getting along with the other children at the orphanage, but thinks he is a very promising candidate for SeeD. **

**Treatment Recommendations: Seifer Almasy is one of the original orphans, and is to be medically cleared for GF junctioning. **

**Comments: Pt. is quite the handful, and, as I mentioned before, quite sarcastic. He seems very eager to get started training, and, as he puts it, 'beating up stupid little chicken wusses', whatever that is supposed to mean. I suspect I will be seeing quite a lot of him in my office during his time here. I will set him up for a lower level GF and we will see how he does with that. **

* * *

><p>There is a fist inside her chest.<p>

It used to be her heart, but now it is only a solidly frozen mass, all curled up around the edges, and she keeps trying to swallow around it like that will drain the adhesive from her tongue and the anger from her throat-

Dawning realization is an open-handed slap that leaves her reeling underneath it, and she watches the sallow stripes of her knuckles go white and whiter and whiter, paler than the smoothly unmarked paper underneath them.

His voice is just a subtle background to all the thoughts churning and pounding and chipping away at her mind, and she cannot tell or even bring herself to care what he is saying: she is being shattered in this eternal ocean crest that keeps folding down and down and down over the top of her head-

Her realization is the rocks, you see, and she the driftwood, and she is being broken and hurled apart in pieces and then nudged back into place: this is how badly it hurts, like being taken apart and put back together all over again, like that hand Seifer describes in a low voice on nights he can't sleep, reaching inside his brain to tear out everything that is of no use to his mother.

Her rage coils up in her chest and layers smoke between her ears.

They _knew_.

They knew the icy presence of Shiva in her mind would take away everything, her mother hanging sheets and Selphie playing house and a green-eyed boy and his stick sword, _they knew _and they _wanted _it, they stole the best years of her _life _like it was nothing, like the boy and his smile were _nothing_, and the girl in a cheery dress the color of sunshine getting nibbled away at by years and rot and maggots- she is nothing to them as well, she is _dead_- _she is dead _and Quistis can barely remember anything of her before she learned how to kill-

"Quistis-"

There is a hand on her arm that creeps tentatively up her forearm like he is seeking the core of the tension that has wound her up like a caged predator, and she yanks away so quickly they are both startled.

She thinks she sees something in his eyes that reminds her of hurt: a flicker of lightning, it is here and gone that quickly.

She is through the door to his office with the folder still in one hand and her glasses awkwardly tip-tilted on her nose before she realizes she has still not spoken a single word to him.

* * *

><p><em>-are you there rinoa rinoa are you awake-<em>

"I'm awake."

_ -how do you feel-_

"Good. But…this isn't hurting her, right? I don't want to hurt her."

_-she'll be fine rinoa don't worry-_

"Are you sure? I just don't want her to get hurt, ok? If it's hurting her, I want to stop."

_-she'll be fine rinoa we promise don't worry about ellone rinoa this is what she was designed for-_

**A/N: Apologies for my proclivity for completely nonsensical dream sentences. Also, I could not remember for sure if it was actually revealed whether Cid knew what GF junctioning would do to the orphanage gang, and if so, whether the gang knew he had done it on purpose- I tried looking it up, but didn't really find anything- so for the sake of this story, let's pretend they had no idea they were meant to forget their entire childhood.**


	19. Interlude Nine

**A/N: I am working on getting this story into the home stretch now; you guys are still about a hundred pages behind the original document, and there's still a bit of plot to be played out from the point I'm working on right now, but I pretty much know how everything is going to turn out, aside from a few minor tweaks here and there. I think I will probably wait until I've finished the chapter I'm currently working on before posting ten, but I got a good chunk of work done on it today and it's now over half complete, so I may post ten this weekend if I have time. If not, it'll go up sometime this week. Thanks for reading, as always! **

_Dear Selphie, _

_ I HAVE SALVED THE GRATE HOT DOG CUNSPEARASEE._

_ Man, I'm so exsited. This is a reel breakthru for me, you know? So what happened is I'm in the cafaterea today and Seifer gets a hamberger but you know how the hambergers don't really look like hambergers, but their all weird and lumpy and kinda greyish and on Tuesdays they bounce? (How come they never bounce on any other day, by the way? It's like they put something speshal in them on Tuesdays or something.) Anyway, so I'm sitting their making gagging noises because those things are just nasty I don't care what Seifer says about the hot dogs, those hambergers are made out of Galbadian dickholes, not the other way around. So anyway I'm sitting they're and we're talking and all of a sudden I see this little spot of green on the bottom of his hamberger, right Selph? So I say hey what the hell is that, and Seifer goes what, and I point out the little spot of green, and he gets this look on his face like he's going to throw up, which is pretty funny, so I sit there for a while laughing at him and he gets all pissed and throws his salud at me, and then all of a sudden I reelize what it is!_

_ ALIENS, Selphie! See, the lunch ladies are smuggling them into the hambergers, and their using the kitchen as a breeding ground, and at nite when no one's in there to keep an eye on everything, the adult aliens and the baby aliens come out and they eat all the hot dogs! _

_ I think the lunch ladies know exactly what's goin on but they don't bother to do anything about it becuz there selling the aliens to Galbadian politishions who make them fight in illegal alien cage fights, and their making a bunch a money so they don't care that daserving students are going hungry. I think it's a bunch of shit, Selph, is what I think it is, and someone shud do something about it; this revolution needs a leader, and I think I'm the one to do it, since I'm the one who figured it out and all. I ran it all by Seifer, but he was a jerk about it, suprise suprise, so I guess he's not going to help me, witch I wasn't really expecting anyway, so that's ok- he can go on eating his nasty alien infected hambergers, and I will lead the students of B. Garden in a Garden-wide revolt against those ladies for taking away our hot dogs, and I'm gunna be a hero and stuff- I think they'll probly make a statue of me and put it in Balamb, maybe by the gas station, or on the docks! Yeah, on the docks, so everyone sees it first thing when they come in off the water. There's this guy who used to be a couple of dorms down from me that liked to think of himself as an artist and stuff- I always thought he was kinda' stuck up and douchey (Seifer taut me how to spell that word the other day, and then Quistis ruined it by saying douchey's not a real word anyway, but Seifer said if you can define it and someone will agree with you on the word and the defanition then it's a word and it can be put in the dictionary, so he said douchey, adjective, what Instruktor Green looks like when he tries to grow facial hare and Quistis just rolled her eyes and didn't say anything, so I think we won) but anyway he was actually pretty good, so I was thinking, maybe I could commishion him for my statue? _

_ What pose do you think I should do for it? Like, I was thinking I could do the sorta classic leg up on something and have my elbow on my knee and my chin on my hand and look all thotful and stuff, but Seifer says you can only do that if you don't have a chicken brain and can actually have intelligent thots, but he didn't like the statue idea in the first place anyway, so screw him. I'm pretty sure he's just jelous, Selphie. I mean, no one's ever made a statue of him, and if they did it'd probly have a bunch of bird crap on it, and people would draw boobies on it and stuff with permanent marker. I wouldn't though I'd draw a penis on its forehead becuz that's what he is sometimes, a big old infected dick. (Thingy, sorry Selph I know you don't like that word.)_

_ Love you Selphie. I'll see you someday, and I'll tell you all about how the revolution and the statue and everything went. I know you'll understand. _

_ Love,_

_ Zell_


	20. Chapter Ten

**A/N: So some of you have probably already noticed that there is a new option to upload images to the site to serve as book covers for fics. I would looove a cover for this story and Ashes (and any other fics that tickle someone's fancy) if anyone reading this is artistically gifted and would be willing to whip one up. I was thinking more along the lines of digital art, but really, go nuts if you're interested. I put a post up on the Seifer/Quistis LJ boards regarding this as well, so hopefully someone bites. You would get full credit, of course, and my eternal gratitude. **

**Chapter Ten**

For so long, everything inside of her has been coiled up and packed away and out of her reach, and now she is all frothing thunderheads and storm-thrashing power lines that stretch out and out and out inside of her, until there is nothing but singing in her veins-

-voices in your head and pounding between your temples tick tick tick tick tick they say tick tick tick tick tick you have been here long enough that's the sound of time slipping away and running out-

Everything is raw and hissing and she is so _alive _it's like music and color and life itself all being born inside of her, right now, clashing and swirling and butting up against one another-

-tick tick tick tick tick tick tick you hear all the minute hand clicks in the clock and the pink in the sky beyond the arc of your open window it sounds like blood plink plink plinking off swords and teeth that are so bright bright brighter than the stars all around you-

Her world is an interstellar smear, going on forever, spinning faster and faster and faster outside this prison she is so very very sick of-

* * *

><p>Balamb Garden<p>

Balamb

She does not sleep.

She is listening to the sky beyond the window of this dorm room they have temporarily given her, until Dr. Kadowaki feels it is completely safe to release her back to Esthar.

It is not safe. She is _listening to the sky_, for Hyne's sake, and what is even more disconcerting is all the colors smeared together into one long sunrise streak each have their own frequency, like separate notes in a sonata: blue is a high hummingbird buzz in her ears and green is the thumping bass tempo of war drums, heavy and irregular and hard as her heartbeat-

She has been feeling better for _days_, why can't she just be left _alone_-

When she dreams now, it is with her eyes open, and they are not her memories to probe, but she falls helplessly into them anyway-

She is a boy on a beach dreaming of dragons and princesses and knights who are good and handsome and beloved by all-

She is a broken hunchback of a man who can only just remember the boy and his sword-

She is spinning.

She does not land softly.

* * *

><p>Balamb Garden<p>

4 Years Ago

I put both feet up on my desk and fist a hand against the smirk that goes hard and tight and ugly when she looks at Squall instead: her order is so practiced and polished she does not even have to glance at me when she gives it.

"Cadet Almasy, feet off your desk, please."

I take my time shifting them across the aisle onto Puberty Boy's desk instead, and now those gloss-layered lips pucker up like an old woman's. I wonder who the fuck she's making herself all pretty for, but this is just a rhetorical question: it's pretty goddamned obvious by the way she's been going all fucking moon-eyed every time she looks at him.

"Seifer, feet on the floor. _Now_." It's when she uses my first name that I know I've really pissed her off, and I feel the twist of contempt unsnarl itself from my lips and out unfolds a real smile, the kind I don't normally give her, because it's not like it makes a fucking ounce of difference- Pubes has got her by the goddamned ovaries, for some fuck-me-who-knows reason.

Maybe it's a little sick, but when she orders me around like that, I go all fucking tingly inside.

I take a long time lowering my boots, because she knows and I know and this entire fucking classroom knows she's never had any sort of authority over me; I _own _these fucking halls and these rows and rows of mirror-polished desks full of drooling fuckwits not good or smart or skilled enough to lick shit from my boots-

She drops something across her desk that makes enough of a racket to get my attention, and my head snaps up and around to see her calmly uncoiling her whip at the front of the classroom, and half a dozen eyes pop owl wide in their fucking sockets as they swing back and forth between me and her.

There is a musical ding from the loudspeaker overhead that tells us all class is over and we are free, and I scrape back my chair and shift all 6' 2" of me out into the aisle, nudging Pubes as he is just beginning to get up and sending him sprawling back down behind his desk; I've got him by a good thirty pounds of muscle, and the look that chafes underneath his bangs like a knife in his fucking socket tells me he knows this, and he's not going to contest it right here, right now with them all watching.

Later.

"Seifer," Trepe says in that smooth-oiled tone that is all her rage tightly bottled up inside, where she can pretend it doesn't exist, and her whip comes up through a casual loop that flinches back the students who have just tentatively begun to edge their way toward the door. "I'd like to speak with you for a moment."

There is something about her standing there like that- hip cocked to one side, the rattlesnake helix of chain-jingling weapon pooled at her feet like a cat sleeping with one eye open, ready to go soon as you make a single wrong fucking move- that makes me go all nuclear inside, emergency meltdown with my heart in my throat and superheated sweat-gloss smearing itself across both my palms beneath my gloves, only this has nothing to do with fear: it's adrenaline and lust and a little smoke-your-fucking-heart anger, because if she didn't spend all her time panting after that asshole, I wouldn't have to make such a dick of myself just to stand out.

She fucking _forgot _me like nothing I ever did or said or promised even mattered in the first goddamned place-

I peel my lips up off my teeth as the door shuts reluctantly behind the last of her students, and it's not my real smile I've got on my face anymore: that twist of contempt is back, all snarl and slather and bite with no bark. I hope she can read every single nuance of it in my narrowed eyes.

"I gather," she says dryly, moving to the front of her desk, winding up that rattlesnake helix as she goes, "that you consider yourself to be better than anyone in this entire Garden- unequaled in your fighting skills and what you consider to be wit."

"I see all of those rug burns on your knees aren't for nothing, Instructor."

Her eyes tighten up around the corners and I see her mouth go thin as a fucking wire in that moonlit face, but she doesn't otherwise acknowledge my comment. "If you are so secure in your skills, then I'm sure someone such as myself shouldn't pose any sort of problem, even armed against your hand to hand abilities." She does not look away from my face as she begins to tape up the barbs on that whip, unwinding the roll with agile flicks of her wrist.

"You won't need the tape. You're not going to hit me with that. What's this about, anyway? Are you worried my dick is bigger than yours, Instructor?" I ask pleasantly, crossing both arms over my chest and leaning one hip up against her desk. "Trying to prove dominance here? If it'll make you feel better, you can tie me up and spank me a little. I know you've gotta' be lonely, going all bitch in heat over some guy who wouldn't give you a second look if you shaved your head and started calling yourself 'Steve'."

"I've given you twenty detentions so far this year," she snaps, and now there's a rush of heat in those stone-polished cheeks that makes something knot up inside of me, and I drop my arms to both sides and take a step back, eyeing her. "You are consistently rude, uncooperative and disruptive no matter how many times I file complaints with Cid, no matter how many times you are disciplined-"

I snort hard enough to pause her mid-sentence. "Disciplinary action here is a fucking joke. 'Sit in the corner, you've been a mean little cadet. If you don't play nice, I'm _not _giving you any cookies!'"

"Something needs to change," she finishes quietly, that taped-up whip all coiled up in her hand now. "You need to be shown who is in charge, Seifer."

And she's fucking _on _me.

I dodge the first lightning lick of that muffled tip flicking out to wrap itself like a fucking garrote around my throat, and a smooth jerk of a rising block puts some space between my arm and hers, and wraps that whip around my forearm.

I yank.

She stumbles forward against me, and there's this electric fucking tingle in my throat and my chest and even lower, if I'm being honest with myself, because it's fucking _over _already, that quick, except what she catches herself with is not her hand on my chest or her arms around my waist, but her knee in my balls, so fast I just barely deflect the hit off the side of my knee, and my boys get a taste of aftershock that splashes vomit into the back of my fucking throat-

She doesn't have my strength or reach, with that long lean line of oil-glistening leather still looped around my arm, but she's fucking _fast_: she can fit herself into spaces half as narrow as anything I'd even attempt to slip myself inside, and her fists one two my stomach and my nose before I even realize she's inside my guard-

And _fuck me _now I'm _pissed_, and I unravel her whip from my arm in one smooth execution of a flip and a yank, and it's across the room before she can even try and make a grab for it: she uses this momentary distraction to aim another one of those goddamned knees for my balls, and a stinging slap of a cross block knocks her hand away and puts us hip to hip with my forearm up across her neck.

I back her into the desk; she slides a sidekick low and dirty toward the inside of my knee, but this is only a distraction: what she's really going for is a reverse hold that will put her behind me where I'm all kinds of vulnerable, and before she can complete the move my hand flashes out to catch her wrist and now she's bent over that desk in front of me with one arm twisted up behind her back, cheek to cheek with all those mounds and mounds of fucking paper.

Her ass is all firm smooth lines of muscle and silk beneath tissue paper skirt and for half an eyeblink of a moment, I think about what it feels like pressed up against my dick, and god_dammit_; fucking _Quistis Trepe _is giving me a boner. It's not like I haven't pictured her like this before, bent over in this ninety degree L of an angle, one hand braced against glass-shining mahogany and her ass pressed into my crotch like she's trying to rub me off with her fucking crack, but _shit fuck _the reality leaves me breathlessly half-lidded like I'm fucking Chicken Wuss getting a peek at the latest shipment of hot dogs-

That hand on her desk slides slowly up off the stack of paperwork it's resting on, and now it's on my thigh.

Her fingers are so fucking warm- I need to know if the rest of her body is this goddamned warm- and now my eyes slip closed and there's this pathetic little fucking hiss between my teeth that tells her exactly how into this I am, if the hard-on against her ass isn't enough of an indication-

-and the bitch has got me by the fucking _balls _and everything is swirling red redder fucking _reddest _all around me and behind my eyes explode sprays of fireworks that paint my lids white-noon nuclear-

She folds all the way down to the goddamned floor with me, fistful of sack in one hand and her glasses in the other.

She lets me dry heave and slur threats and coil myself up like a fucking baby in its blanket, and I blink smudges of pain tears from my eyes as she lets go and steps away, and I see her coolly re-arrange those glasses across her fucking nose-

And now she goes calmly back to her fucking _desk_, like she hasn't just fucking _mangled _me-

"I'll see you in class tomorrow, Seifer. With a hopefully humbler attitude."

* * *

><p>Balamb Garden<p>

Balamb

The sky outside her window goes rose-steel and slowly layers itself into patches of gunmetal that go deep and deeper and deeper until there is nothing else: distant thunder rumble is her soundtrack, now.

It makes for better listening than the voices in her head, jumbled and distorted and all tangled up together until she can barely separate out the thread of her own accent: she is Ellone or Seifer or Quistis or Rinoa; she is Laguna/Raine/Squall-

She is still spinning.

She is never going to come down.

* * *

><p>Underneath and around and above you hand-welded steel superheats and cools and tick tick ticks in between all that warmth and chill-<p>

_-rinoa hold on ok hold on-_

She can see goggle-eyed faces peering out at her from curves of inches-thick window pane that reflect back smears of stars and planets and the steel-shining pod of her prison-

_-rinoa hold on-_

-and your hands curl into fists and you burrow deep deep deeper under all your layers and layers of blankets and outside your window hiss tiny accusatory voices of raindrops like fucking piss and you are so very very _confused_, because that doesn't sound like you at all, the voices are all jumbled up in your head please someone _help_-

_-get ready rinoa-_

Her prison becomes a mirror image reverse in these curves of inches-thick window pane, close close _so close_-

-and you realize suddenly that breathing tastes like knives, all going down at the same time-

Goggle-eyed faces resolve into features she can just barely make out, through layers of breath-smoked plastic and gem-winking blurs of constellation like tiny diamond-glossed slivers of shrapnel-

-metal glass plastic _bone _crumpling and folding up and shredding apart like paper and-

-you roll over and bury your face and you _scream_-

_-rinoa hold on hold on for just a second we're going to fix it breathe just breathe concentrate rinoa-_

You see stars in the glass and stars in the sky-

A half-second squeeze of a tear-smeared blink slots puzzle pieces of coherency back into one another and now everything goes stark sunlit blaze around her-

Unconsciousness unfolds like a wave and comes down like a hammer and inside your chest your heart _tha-thump tha-thump tha-thumps_-

You slip under.

* * *

><p>He'd never seen the good doctor's face this white before.<p>

"Quistis, you have to understand-"

"Understand _what_? That you and Cid took away our childhoods _on purpose_, that you let us all grow up alone and apart, because you didn't care about what was best for us, only what would help Garden?"

He slid one hand up over her shoulder and tightened his fingers in a brief conciliatory squeeze that hunched his friend's shoulders up toward her ears: lines of tension radiated all the way down her neck beneath the collar of her shirt, twists of rope like the tendons in his hand, marble-gravestone white.

Dr. Kadowaki peeled her hand away from her face, and underneath her fingers peeked a woman all whittled down to bone, centenarian-aged crepe paper and bruise-hollowed eye sockets, collapsed inward. "Medical reports are clinical and nothing else, Quistis. None of them mentions anything about how much the choices I made tortured me. You have no idea how difficult it was to push those evals through."

The folders in Quistis claw-stiffened hand came up through a loop that pressed them tightly against her chest, and Irvine stepped up next to her to rest one hand against the small of her back. "Quisty, darlin', maybe-"

"Selphie is dead," she said coldly, going stiff beneath his hand. "I grew up with her, and now she's _dead_, and I can barely even remember what she was like, before this place got ahold of her."

"Cid ordered you all to be recommended for junctioning, regardless of potential side effects- that was why you were eased into it with low level Guardian Forces for a long time. You've seen what happens to some cadets who don't junction- some minds just can't take the pressure of sharing skulls with something that…elemental, but with all of you, we didn't have a choice," Kadowaki replied quietly. "Cid needed you to forget about the orphanage and Matron so that you could fight her without being weighed down by the guilt of killing your mother."

"_Seifer _never junctioned- he knew exactly who Matron was, and he let Ultimecia use him so he could try and protect his mother. He loved her that much; so did the rest of us, if we could've just _remembered _it-"

"And how did having his memory intact help Seifer?" Kadowaki snapped, bringing a hand to her forehead. "I'm sorry, Quistis. But what happened to Seifer is exactly what Cid hoped to avoid- as much as it hurt him, he wanted none of you to have any sort of ties to either him or Matron anymore, so that you could do what had to be done. Seifer was supposed to have been junctioned like all the rest of you- he was, back when he first started at Garden, but he didn't like it and unjunctioned himself. When Cid discovered this, he ordered him to begin junctioning immediately." She blew out a sigh that slumped her forward over her desk, one hand to her forehead. "But you know Seifer, and junctioning a GF isn't exactly something you can force someone to do, in the end. Even if he'd made SeeD back then, he'd have never been assigned to that parade; Cid wanted to keep him as far away as possible."

"Least until I shot her," Irvine cut in grimly, something cold and hard and ridged sliding in and up and out again, unraveling everything inside of him, one piece at a time. "I didn't junction any GFs either; never saw anyone getting all butt hurt over how I might feel, shooting a woman who used to read me bedtime stories."

"Cid was sure G. Garden would get you junctioned immediately- most cadets are, there. He didn't even worry about it. By the time he found out you weren't, it was too late; you were the only sharpshooter at either Garden good enough to make the shot."

He was a pathetic sniveling mess of a soldier, getting talked back from the edge by a brother who didn't even know who the hell he was-

-_Bright blood-smears of numbers tick over into this moment he has been waiting for his entire career._

_ There is a clockwork rumble underneath him and inside his chest his breath goes hot and sharp and stifling and he's got one finger on the trigger steady and smooth as you please but he can't do it he _can't do it _that's his _mother _down there please please _please _Hyne don't make him do this-_

"Cid loves you both," Kadowaki said gently, leaning back in her chair and folding both hands in front of her on that paper-smudged desk. "He never stopped considering _any _of you his children; he used to visit me just to check up on you all, make sure you were all healthy and happy and-"

"I was never _happy_," Quistis interrupted coldly. "I was _accomplished_. That's all."

"And you don't think that poor man was tormented by that? He hated to see you all drift apart as you forgot one another; he had to plan his own _wife's _murder, for Hyne's sake, Quistis. He didn't want any of this. He _never _wanted this sort of life for any of you; it was necessary. I'm sorry for everything and everyone you've all lost; it's not fair, I know, that you can never have normal lives, that you all grew up too soon- Cid regrets it. I regret it. I visited Matron briefly in prison before she was executed, and she was devastated at how everything turned out, what her sweet children had been turned into, what she did to Seifer. You have every right to be angry." She brought one hand up out of that knot with another sigh; groping fingers found the edge of her glasses and slipped underneath, and for a long moment Irvine watched her rub her eyes in silence.

"Sorry doesn't change anything," he said quietly at last. "I miss Selphie every damn day of my life, and I think about everything she should have been, because she was never a very good soldier, you know? Sure, she could swing those suckers around, kick butt with the best of us, but in the end, she was like me: hated killin', hated hurtin' other people…just hated everything about it." A brief fist-muffled cough evened out the crack in his voice, and he reached up to tip down a hat that wasn't there anymore, his hand stalling mid-stretch. "I hate…I hate that it had to be us. Some days, I hate Cid and Matron and the orphanage and everything I missed out on while I was at G. Garden, watchin' videos of people gettin' raped and shot and tortured to 'toughen me up'." He slanted a nod toward Quistis. "Quisty's one of the smartest people I've ever met; she could've been anything, growing up- that's what I always thought. She's wasted on this place, following orders and drowning in paperwork and lecturing a bunch of little assholes who don't appreciate her. Dincht's one a' the most genuinely nice guys I've ever met; he could've been this great father, loving husband- and you know where we're all going to end up? You don't retire outta' SeeD. I give most of us twenty-five, thirty, and then we'll be a couple of headstones on that beach, next to Selphie and Matron."

He watched her slide a long slow line of moisture along both lips, her hands becoming fists on the desk. "Irvine-"

"I ain't gonna' lie," he interrupted. "There's a part of me that's never going to forgive Cid for any of that. There's a part of me that's never going to stop blaming him a little for Selphie. But I still love the man like a father, you know? Got nothing else. And maybe I can't forgive him, but he's a better man than me, so maybe someday he'll forgive himself, because if it wasn't us, it woulda' been someone else. Just the way shit works out, sometimes."

Kadowaki smudged away several tears with the tips of her fingers before they could fall. "I am sorry," she whispered. "You'll never even know how much, either one of you."

He slung his arm up across Quistis' shoulders, and a single brief pulse of his biceps snugged her up against his side, soft and warm and vaguely vanilla-scented. "Important thing is, we all found each other, and we're just gonna' ride this on out to the end, as long as that takes."

* * *

><p>It all tasted like cafeteria-flavored paste on her tongue, lumpy cancer-gray sludge thick as three-day-old coffee.<p>

Across the table from her, Irvine cupped his chin in one hand with a frown, tipping his head toward her plate. "What's the matter? Something wrong with your waffle?"

"No," she sighed. "It's fine."

"Doesn't look like it; you're making the same face Dincht gets when he eats too many hot dogs and all the bathrooms nearest to the cafeteria are bein' used."

She poked her glasses back up her nose. "Thank you for that particular mental image," Quistis replied wryly, giving the cream-colored pile on her plate another listless stab.

"You still upset about what happened with Dr. Kadowaki?"

"It isn't about that," she said quietly.

"Man, Quisty, sometimes you're a worse liar than Almasy; see why you two don't really keep any secrets from one another." He slid his elbow over the table toward her, his hand coming down to cover hers in a fractional half-moment of a warmly familiar squeeze that made her smile, just slightly. "If you wanna' talk about it, I'm right here, sweetheart."

She watched smears of incoming boats through the window to her left, gliding across ocean the color of sunset, all swirled together into the water-washed strawberry stain of diluted blood. "Seifer asked me to marry him."

A half second blink of a pause preceded Irvine's carefully casual reply. "I know. He told me yesterday; wouldn't shut up about it."

"I said yes."

"Know that too. He said I could help him pick out the ring, since I was the girliest friend he had. Real sweet guy, your future husband."

Something inside of her rolled over and tightened up and squeezed itself into a knot of knife-edged pain, right underneath her heart. "I can't marry him."

"You said you would- you gonna' take that back, now that you've got the poor guy's hopes all up?"

"He wants me to quit Garden with him after the war, and have a normal life together. And when he asked me, it seemed so…so _doable_. He seemed so sure of himself, the way he always is, like we could both just walk away and make a living for ourselves that didn't involve killing for profit. And I was…caught up in thinking about that sort of life, in imagining waking up whenever I wanted to and going shopping and cooking dinner and maybe having children one day, the way normal women do, the way normal women don't even think _twice _about."

Irvine took a long, slow contemplative sip from his coffee mug. "Who says you can't do that, Quisty, if you're willing and he's willing?"

She folded her mouth into a wry reprimand of a lip purse. "You're the one who said no one retires from SeeD."

He walked a sugar packet over his knuckles, his omelette going cold on the plate in front of him. "Quistis, no one ever retires from SeeD because no one thinks to get out before it's too late. We're all so caught up in what we know, we never think we can break free of the mold- don't know anything about bein' someone who's not a soldier, so who the hell are we to try and bust out and get a normal nine-to-fiver and a couple a' kids and a place with a porch swing? Who's gonna' take us, when all we know is neck snappin' and wind speed calculation and how to shoot off a Thundaga before the other guy fries you? But you know what that idiot boyfriend of yours told me you said to him, right before he scowled and punched me in the arm and said I could 'fucking forget I ever heard that'? He said that you believe he could get out, go be whatever the hell he wanted to be. And you know, guy was practically glowing when he said that; it meant a lot to him, Quisty, that you thought he was worth relying on. He'd take care of you, you know."

She looked down with a frown at the napkin in her hand, balled up by fingers gone amputation-numb. "Seifer's never followed the rules, Irvine- it's all I've ever done."

"So what you're sayin' is you don't think you can make it on your own out there, without Garden."

"I don't know how to do anything else," she said softly. "It's not that I don't want to be with him…it's not that I don't want the kind of life that doesn't involve waking up every morning wondering if I'm going to die, if one of my friends is going to die, but Dr. Kadowaki was right: we can never have normal lives, Irvine. They did this to us a long time ago, and maybe everyone is sorry about it, but none of us can take it back."

"So, you just lied to him when you said you thought he could do something else, be something more than what Garden's pigeonholed him into?"

"Of course not." She tipped her glasses back up her nose with a frown, looking down at the shreds of napkin beneath her fingers. "Seifer's never been pigeonholed into anything; he's spent his whole life doing anything and everything he can, as long as it's something someone told him not to. Garden is my home, whether I like it or not; all I've ever done is pour every single _ounce _of everything I have into that place, Irvine. Who would I even be, without Garden?"

He leaned back from the table with his chin tilted down and both hands folded behind his head, and something inside of her sharpened itself to a point that began to chip away at her layer by layer by layer: she had watched him lounge this way in the quad so many times before, his hat over his eyes and Selphie's head on his chest, she had watched them giggle and embrace and be _happy_, and for just a moment she could hardly even _breathe_, remembering this.

Selphie was a hole in the ground and two feet of white-marble headstone, going moldy and maggot-eaten and rat-nibbled in that cheerful yellow-sun outfit they'd buried her in.

* * *

><p>And this is what it really comes down to: she is afraid that one day he is going to meet the same fate, one day he too will be just another white-marble name casting back reflections of sun scatter the same pattern as the diamonds in the waves, and she does not want to be around to witness it.<p>

She does not want to be around to witness _any _of them leaving her alone and unloved and shattered. She is tired of picking up the pieces of herself and glueing them back together and doing this over and over and over again, until she has time for nothing else: it is having others ready and willing and able to help her through the entire process that makes it all worth it, and one day, she is going to have no one.

And there is is: she's said it.

She is going to have no one; perhaps Quistis Marae Trepe will never grow old, in this profession she has not so much chosen as been born into, but she will grow alone, because one by one by one they will all leave her, they will all become matching white-marble headstones on a beach that is bleached to the same corpse-pale color, on days when the sun reflects just right upon the sands, and she is not ready, she _will never be ready _for any of this-

But she is ready to watch him go least of all.

* * *

><p>"You can't just give up on something because you're scared, Quisty."<p>

His soft voice brought her back, pulled her up, and she released her convulsive hold on the napkin in front of her to fold both hands into a pale wire-tight knot of composure on the table between them. "What?"

"You're scared you're not good enough for him. You're scared of losing him- you're scared of being alone, just like all the rest of us. We're orphans, Quisty; Dincht was really the only one who ever got a shot at a normal loving family, after we left the orphanage. You think the rest of us aren't terrified of being left behind and alone and forgotten? You think _Seifer's _not scared of that? We were the only two who remembered the orphanage, when all the rest of you forgot, Quisty. We know all about being left behind, getting looked over by the people you love. I ain't an idiot. You can put on a good face, you can bury yourself in one of your books and pretend you're fine, bein' by yourself, but at G. Garden I was known as the loner, kinda' an outcast; the ladies liked the whole tall dark and mysterious thing, but you think I didn't want friends, like everyone else? You think I sat around in the quad alone with my gun in my lap, looking up at the sky and countin' all the clouds and trying to decide what shapes they made until the sun set and it was time to go in for curfew because I wanted to? I got left behind by all of you- so did Seifer. I was terrified of getting close to anyone else. If everyone I ever cared about, if the kids I grew _up _with forgot me just like that, what was I to a couple of strangers that saw me as competition for top rankings in SeeD, you know?"

Shame opened a bleak black hole inside her. "I'm sorry."

"Ain't your fault. We just had a whole discussion on this with the good doctor, remember? Nothing any of you coulda' done- Seifer and I barely escaped the same fate ourselves. I just managed to slip through the cracks, and he was too busy being in love with himself to let anything else share the ride. But Quisty, listen to what I'm saying: don't give up on this, because you're afraid he's gonna' die, or get sick of you, or you're gonna' be some kind of disappointment to him. You love him. He loves you. For people like us, it's that simple. So go on and marry the guy. Quit Garden. Get another job- you're a brilliant, beautiful, capable woman, Hyne-dammit. You can do anything, I know you can. So get the hell out of this life, before it's too late- be _happy_, ok? Have his Hyne-damned babies if you want to, so I can spoil the crap out of them and give 'em back all hyped up on sugar and suddenly Almasy's got three little Zells on his hands, running around, pulling his hair, interruptin' your sex life."

She stifled a laugh in the palm of her hand, and behind the barrier of her fingers she felt her lips flicker and soften up and reach toward a smile.

He took another sip of his coffee and set it down with her smile reflected back on his face, his eyes beneath the pale peach-fuzz wisps of his new eyebrows growing crepe-paper spirals of crow's feet at the corners. "I love you guys, Quisty; I just want to see you both happy, all right? Just don't tell Seifer that; he'll start making snarky comments in the locker rooms about dropping the soap around me and making a big production outta' hidin' his wang behind a towel. Just don't make it so Hyne-damned difficult, ok? You don't have to over-think everything. Hell, just shut your brain off once in a while. Dincht does it all the time, and look at how he's turning out."

* * *

><p>He opens his door to find her standing on his front porch with her hair loosely cascading down her back and the sun smeared into a long red brushfire along the horizon, crowning her shoulders.<p>

He leans one hand against the door frame and looks her up and down like she is a car he is appraising, because he knows this exploitation of his much larger frame annoys the fuck out of her, and maybe he'd never admit it aloud, but sometimes he kind of likes that stick up her ass: it puts all her buttons right out there in the open, just waiting for him to push. "Need something, Instructor?" He demonstrates with his smirk and the quirk of his eyebrows just exactly what it is he thinks she needs.

Her lip purse is an answering smirk all touched up around the corners with smudges of sun-glow like lipstick, all glossy fuck-me red.

And then the smirk wilts around the edges and flattens out into something softer, and his heart is suddenly a drum inside his chest, getting whaled on by some fucking asshole with too much enthusiasm and not enough talent.

Sometimes she pisses him off with all her restrictions and her bossiness and the way she stirs her coffee exactly three times before taking a sip of it, even though she insists on drinking it black and has absolutely fucking nothing to dissolve into it.

But that smile is a goddamned hammer coming down on his heart, and it is all he can fucking do to stand there with his dignity still in place, staring down at her like he is some goggle-eyed fucking loser in her class, trying to catch a glimpse of cleavage.

"I just wanted to see you," she says, and he is such a fucking _sap _everything squeezes up inside of him like a fist going white-knuckled inside his chest and his guts and his throat, and when she leans forward to wind her hands into the front of his shirt and pull his head down far enough to reach his lips, he remembers again how completely _fucking _weak he is, when it comes to this woman.

But there is still enough asshole left in him to get a handful of her ass and turn her chaste public kiss into something that fires all the nerve endings in his body and stands his dick up like a signpost, because that prudish old bitch across the street hates his fucking guts, and he knows she is watching through her curtains.

* * *

><p><em>red smears <em>

_ his watercolor dreams _

_ into nightmare-_

_Everything fucking _hurts _there are claws tearing everything all to shit his brain is on _fire _don't you fucking get it-_

-seifer _NO-_

_ Her shoulders twitch and flinch back and ripple tiny humps of shivers beneath his gloves and he watches blood-colored lips peel back into something he thinks is supposed to be a smile, but this is like nothing he's ever seen before: these teeth are sharpened to points of fang like the night-black tips that are the tapered curves its fingers end in-_

_ What the fuck _is _this thing-_

_ -_seifer no more please_-_

_ This place is alive all around him: riptides that pull and tug and spin him faster and faster and fucking _faster _until he doesn't get where or who or what the fuck he is anymore-_

_ Her plea is this tiny little mewl of a thing, and he wants to rip her fucking throat out with his bare fucking hands, for being so weak-_

_ Doesn't she fucking _get it _he's not doing this because he wants to this is all _necessary _it was _Matron _who wanted him to do this from the very beginning and maybe he doesn't understand it, maybe he doesn't _like _it, but she's his _mother_, you dumb bitch, she's his mother and all he wants to do is make her happy-_

_ Red red red red redredredredredred he's never _seen _so fucking much of it before, it's all over his head like someone has taken an axe to his brain-_

_ Someone is trying to pull him away from the coils of electricity that pulse and thrum and hammer hammer fucking hammer away at him-_

_ The hand is pale and light as a fucking whisper but it's holding onto him like it has no intention of letting go and he feels his eyes flicker around and back to follow red-smudged peach and suddenly he is fucking terrified-_

_ He cannot figure out if the smudges of red are blood or little pieces of his mind leaking out into the world around him, because it's all hazed with that same bloodshot smoke that boils out from the furnace in his heart and the clots in his brain-_

_ -_seifer_-_

* * *

><p>"Seifer."<p>

He jerked awake with a spasm that yanked him half upright in his bed, blinking sleep adhesive from his eyes.

Pastel lines in the dark resolved themselves into Quistis' staring face, half a foot from his own and clouded in gold. In the layers of moonlight that painted his room pale soft focus silver, he could see the little crescent moon of deeper shadow above her left eyebrow that was the furrow of her frown line, and he lifted one dead-wood arm from the tangled covers underneath him to smooth it away.

"You were dreaming."

"No shit."

The frown shifted but did not vanish.

"Are you all right?"

He was shaky and a little nauseated and he needed to piss like a racehorse.

What the fuck was she doing fully dressed?

He hooked a finger through the collar of her shirt and tugged hard enough to stumble her forward against the bed. "Going somewhere, Instructor?"

"I just had a call from Squall. He needs to talk to me about something."

And that fucking fast, a surge of rage climbed up from his heart and into his neck all the way to his cheeks, on fire like her words were a physical goddamned blow. "So you're sneaking off in the middle of the night to go meet him?"

She rolled her eyes. "Of course not, Seifer. If I was trying to sneak out, do you really think I would have woken you up first?"

"You wouldn't have woken me up if I hadn't been having a nightmare. It's the middle of the fucking night, Quistis. What the hell does Pubes want now?"

"If he's calling in the middle of the night, it means it's important."

He sat all the way up with his hands in fists on top of his thighs, and a one-handed yank on the covers peeled them back to his shins. She stepped back as he threw his legs over the side of the bed and stood up with one hand knotted in the hair at the nape of his neck, scowling. "Is talking to him more important than me?" he spat, feeling one corner of his mouth twist up into something ugly and stunted and grotesque, a half-smile that never reached its mark.

Quistis pinched the bridge of her nose and sighed. "We're not _doing _anything, Seifer," she pointed out calmly. "We were both just sleeping. It isn't as though he's interrupting quality time together."

Well fucking _excuse _him- maybe he just wanted a little fucking _company _while he coaxed his heart rate back down to normal-

He mirrored her stance with that old Seifer smirk painted onto his lips, except this one was all snarled up into something even uglier than anything he'd flashed her from the back of that classroom: razor-bristling and smeared in poison like the venom clotting in his throat and smoking underneath his numb wood-block heart.

It was that still, his heart, all silent and quiescent inside of him, because now his anger was just crowding everything else out, the blood in his veins and his pulse in his neck, and all his shitty little hopes and dreams and fucking fairy-fart wishes for the life he wanted with this woman.

Once he had thought _I can have anything I want_, and he had sealed that promise up inside of himself to stoke the banked fires that made up Seifer Almasy with little reminder flicks of anticipatory lightning until he was old enough to fucking _do _something about it, and then one day his mother hauled this promise naked and squirming out into the sunlight and suddenly all his stupid fantastical fucking boyhood dreams were all ash in his palms, pathetic little goddamned flakes.

His anger made itself into a little coil at the base of his spine, fire that stretched and surged and hazed red the world around him.

He was fucking tired of red: the shit crept into everything, turned his entire fucking existence blood-shot and smoldering, like everything good in his life was just a photo negative laid down over the top of the smoking fucking rubble of his reality. Quistis with her arms stretched out over her head, languishing beside him in bed- just a grayscale phantom waiting to wink out and fade away the second he twitched his hand or blinked an eye. And Wuss and the cowboy- dead somewhere in that rubble, little bleached fucking dolls of themselves, all staring blankness and white-winter skin getting patched over with rot.

"Every time I come back, it's fucking all about him."

She gave him her patient instructor look, and it made him want to break something, it made him want to break _her_- how could she just _stand _here and fucking stare at him like he was some kind of slack-jawed fucking _idiot _baffled by one of her assignments- _he didn't want to lose her_, didn't she _get it_?

That was the sharpness in his voice, honed down to a knife: he didn't want to lose her, and she could never quite give him enough reassurance that he wouldn't- that was what it all fucking came down to in the end, her staying up late with Pubes' next assignment when he'd just returned ripped-up and dragging ass and desperate to see her-

_Tomorrow, Seifer_, was the refrain of his fucking life. Like a piece of paper meant more to her than him, just because that fucking moron had scribbled notes all over the margins.

This was what he couldn't say: he needed her right now, and he wanted her to know it, she should have _gotten _it by now, that maybe most nights he wasn't going to lie there next to her spilling his guts all over the goddamned place, but he needed her hand in his hair and her breath on her neck and just _her_, being there, telling horrible stick-up-the-ass prude jokes until he smiled, because she was just so fucking _painful _sometimes, when she was trying to be funny-

"Seifer, your jealousy is childish," she told him calmly, uncrossing her arms and folding an escaped wisp of hair back behind her ear.

"Every _fucking time _I come home, you're in the middle of something that you're not willing to put off long enough to come see me. I have a week before I head back out to possibly get my ass shot off- you spend most of it conferencing in Pubes' office and telling me you'll 'see me later'. You've got time for all your fucking paperwork and your students and fucking _him_, but I'm supposed to be satisfied with a couple of little pats on the fucking head."

"I can't stop the war just because you've come home. Do you really think I'd rather sit in my office doing paperwork, when all I've been able to think about the past several weeks is whether or not you're dead, whether or not you're going to come home at all?" she snapped, crossing her arms again, pressing them tighter and harder around her middle like she needed them there to keep everything from folding over and collapsing in, and the fire at the base of his spine sputtered just a little.

"I spend every night you're gone too afraid to go inside your house, because everything about it is so much a reminder of you that I can't stand it, and I'm too afraid to _not _go in it, because it might be the only thing I have left of you, and I don't even know it yet." Her voice climbed toward a crescendo that peeled back all that low-hanging red fog clogging up the space between them, and something inside of him crumbled into soot and scattered itself all across his fucking chest.

Swallowing took an eternity. "You never even fucking act like you'd rather be somewhere else, when you're behind that fucking desk in that _fucking _classroom- it's like it's the only thing that matters to you when you're there, and I feel like I'm some kind of goddamned bug that got let in when you forgot to shut the window."

Her voice was cold enough to freeze balls. "The paperwork will not take away everything that means anything to me once it's gone."

Her march toward his kitchen door was a stiff lockstep drumbeat of a stride.

Three long smooth steps covered all the distance she'd crossed in half the time it took her, and a fist splayed out into a palm over her head slammed the door back into its frame when she wrenched it open.

A fractional cock of her head told him she was fucking _pissed_, and an instinctive shift of his free hand brought it down to shield his balls, just in case. "Quistis."

Her shoulders tensed up like she was anticipating some kind of goddamned sneak attack, and he pressed his face into the side of her neck and breathed the scent of her, all soap-scented skin and faded vanilla-fragranced hair, and all he could do was _stand _there, just inhaling her, his nose sketching a faint, faint line down her throat and onto her shoulder, where he left his face.

She pushed him away.

"What the _fuck_?" he snapped.

"Get off me." She flattened her back up against the door and stared him down like he was some unruly fucking student getting on her nerves, and the haze spiraled back up and pieced itself back together and shaped itself into a mass between them. He wanted to tear it down with his bare fucking hands, get his teeth in its throat and rip and rip and fucking _rip_-

"We're both being assholes, _Instructor_." The slight emphatic pressure on her nickname turned it into an insult, and he watched her eyes tighten up around the corners. "Are you going to walk out like this, go running to him and fucking cry-"

"Not everything is about _Squall_, for Hyne's sake! Perhaps if it were, I wouldn't be so frustrated all the time- surly silences are far easier to deal with than a grown man throwing temper tantrums, at least."

He sneered at her. "So go sit on his dick for a while then, and see which you prefer. Maybe my fucking 'temper tantrums' won't seem so bad when you get sick of three limp inches."

"Yes, that seems perfectly reasonable- after all, I am obviously possessed of such loose morals that I'll just hop into bed with my boyfriend's greatest rival over a petty argument," Quistis snapped. She balled her hands into fists at her sides. "Get out of my face, Seifer. I think we established years ago that I'm not intimidated by your bullying."

He stepped in closer, leaning on her just slightly, chest to chest because he knew there was no more prominent button than that precious little fucking bubble of personal space Instructor Trepe wrapped herself in. "_Fine_. Then fucking leave."

She groped behind her for the doorknob without breaking eye contact, her lips white-pinched around the corners. He slammed his hand down on the door again when she yanked it open, and her eyes became fucking skewers, trying to gut him. "_Seifer_."

"_Quistis_," he mimicked.

He saw the blow coming half a second before she nearly landed it, and a deft twist of his hip bounced her knee off the side of his thigh instead, throwing her off-balance. "Are you trying to fucking _neuter _me?"

"Maybe it would calm you down," she suggested icily. "It wouldn't have hurt you- we're too close for any decent follow-through."

"You just aimed your knee at my goddamned _balls_. Don't tell me what will hurt them, until you've got a goddamned set of your own, _Instructor_."

"Then remove your hand from the door if you don't want me to harvest my own pair."

"Look, _Instructor_, walk out if you fucking want to, but don't expect the door to be unlocked when you come back."

"I've been _trying _to leave, if you hadn't noticed. I wasn't intending to come back."

"Got a hot fucking date with some admissions forms?" He sneered. "Maybe a couple of homework assignments planning to tag team you on your desk? You're fucking married to your job, you know that? I don't even know why I asked you in the first place- polygamy is illegal, after all."

"Then take it back, if you're so regretful over it." The red from the haze over his eyes and the smoke in his heart climbed up into her cheeks, and she folded her bottom lip between her teeth and both lids down over her eyes, and she did not look at him again.

It pissed him the fuck _off- _why the fucking _hell _wouldn't she just look at him goddammit, was it really too much to fucking _ask_, for her to meet him eye to fucking eye when she eviscerated him-

"_Look _at me," he snarled.

She lifted her hands to his chest again, and a blindly rabid scrabbling with his fingers joined their hands in a knot between them; she snapped her eyes open into a glower he'd seen eight million times before throughout the course of his career as a cadet, and the angry shove she put all 120 pounds of herself behind barely even budged him. "Let. Go."

"_No_. Break my fucking fingers, if you want out of here that bad."

"Seifer, I have had it up to _here_-"

"Then do it- break my fucking fingers, shove my face through the wall- whatever you have to do, Trepe." He breathed the words three inches from her face, and a brief exploratory pulse on his fingers told him she understood he was serious: she could snap him apart ligament by fucking ligament if she wanted out.

"Why do you have to make everything so Hyne-damned difficult?" she yelled.

"Why do you have to be such an imperious fucking bitch sometimes?" he snapped. "It's ok if you lose your fucking _composure _once in a while, Instructor. Hyne, maybe it'll loosen the fucking stick in your ass."

"Would it kill you to act like an _adult_, once in a while? Squall-"

"Say his fucking name again, and I swear to _Hyne _I'll fucking snap his neck-"

"_Excellent_, Seifer, gratuitous violence always did solve all your problems, didn't it-"

"If it did, you'd be in a fucking _hole _somewhere, Instructor-"

* * *

><p>Their faces are half an inch shy of one another, and maybe it is just the proximity or the heat in his spine and his heart and his throat, but something makes him slam her back against the door and close the distance and now suddenly the energy between them has completely shifted, now it's clawing its way up from his balls and into his gut and they are a fucking tangle of hands and lips and tits in his palms-<p>

She has his shirt off in half a second and he's got these little red-dripping tines of scratches down his back like she's raked him with a fork, and because he went to sleep in just his boxers and the shirt, it's the work of a second for her to strip him naked in his kitchen.

He rips her pants getting them off. The panties he doesn't even bother with: the half second it would take to slide them down her thighs is too long, and these are all soft lace-bordered rayon with just enough stretch to push them aside out of the way without strangling his dick anyway.

They fuck like animals on the floor.

Her skin puckers up beneath his fingers where he digs them into her back and she's got his bottom lip between her teeth hard enough to split the skin, and he barely even registers any of this: there is nothing but one breath passed back and forth between them and the layer of slick salt-scented sweat smeared across his chest and her breasts, fused together like this sweat is adhesive and they're stuck with one another whether they like it or fucking not.

He clenches his hand into a knot at the base of her skull, tangling up all the hair there in his fist and pinwheels of black chase spirals of white across the backs of his lids and split apart like fireworks and he is climbing higher harder- _fuck _she is _everywhere_, slick and tight and warm, and his climb tips toward the edge and teeters on the fucking precipice-

He hears something change in her breathing half a second before his toes curl up and the edge comes slamming up or he tumbles screaming over-

She takes her mouth from his and tilts her head so her cheek is pressed to his and he can hear something in his ear now that's not quite all there, half-formed and shadowy, his name or _Hyne _or just a wordless little gasp that's part expletive or plea-

For as long as it lasts, this fist clench that is her coming undone around him, his own release that tinges black the edge of his consciousness like he's about to pass out right here on the floor underneath her, he keeps one arm around her back and his hand in her hair, and it's not until she goes limp on top of his chest that he stops moving inside of her.

* * *

><p>He was sitting behind his desk with a picture of his son in his hand when she let herself into his office.<p>

Ellone had taken it at the orphanage, just a few months after Adan's birth. Laguna kept a copy of it in his wallet; it made him feel slightly odd, to glimpse that little white-wrinkled corner peeking out of his father's pocket, a tiny little blurred-out triangle of his son's small furrowed fist. The photo was all awkward angles and half a smudged thumbprint in the corner, pixilated flesh tone like a time stamp along the edge, but you got the basic idea: Squall smiling something rare and genuine and wide enough to flash teeth, flapping Adan's hand in an uncoordinated wave for the camera.

Irvine had taken a better one, good-naturedly sniping at Sis for her utter lack of photography skills, and he'd kept that one too, but he liked this one best, for some reason.

It was a little off-kilter, just like his whole life, just like the concept of him having a son in the first place.

His son had his mother's hair and his grandfather's smile, and for once nothing about either of those facts bothered him: he was still in the process of forgiving them both, of course, but each day was another wobbling step forward like the ones his son would falteringly take some day, and slowly, one piece at a time, he was beginning to let go all his festering bitterness and his unfair rage.

His picture of Rinoa was something more private, something locked away and sealed up like all the fragmented images of her he kept preserved in his heart, and he took it out only in moments like this, when he had nothing but the tick tick tick of the clock on the wall above his head as accompaniment.

He laid the two pictures down side by side.

Rinoa smiled up at him through strands of hair blown into a flat black sheet across her lips, but it didn't matter: it never did- you could see that smile through anything.

He could still remember the exact shape of it against his mouth.

A briskly businesslike _click click click _in the hallway outside his door slid his hand back down into the drawer where he kept her safely stowed away, and by the time Quistis had the door open he'd already replaced it on the photo of his son, sliding it back away from him to the edge of the desk where it belonged.

"I'm sorry it took me a little longer than usual." She looked slightly flustered, her perfectly smoothed-back hair down in a windblown tangle around her shoulders.

He didn't need to ask what she'd been doing. She smelled like Seifer.

He started detecting the difference a long time ago, sometime in between losing Rinoa and grudgingly acknowledging the burgeoning something inside of him that had begun to flare in response to this woman. Quistis' presence in his office usually left behind the clean soap-scent of her Garden-issue body wash, and, occasionally, the subtler aroma of something layered underneath that: vanilla or coconut or whatever type of food it was that women inexplicably wanted to smell like. She was too practial to have spent any of her hard-earned funds on something so frivolous, but he remembered sullenly accompanying Rinoa on a shopping trip or two, on days Selphie was away on a mission or…otherwise occupied in Irvine's dorm room, and acquiring little girly knickknacks she could force on Quistis had usually been one of her main goals.

Tonight, she reeked of Seifer's brisk wood-scented aftershave, all musk and amber and rain-layered earth.

His hand tightened subtly on the corner of his desk, and the wood creaked a frail old bone squeal of a warning.

"I'm sorry I'm a little later than I intended to be." She took a seat across from him without elaborating, one hand going self-consciously to her hair.

His plastic smile stretched like a rubber band, humming at its breaking point. "It was short notice."

"What did you need to see me for?"

Right to the point. Which meant he'd interrupted them, and this was all just one long drawn-out obligation she had to make herself endure, counting off silent ticks of seconds in her head until she could be reunited with _Seifer Almasy_, of all people.

The sick clench in his stomach twisted into a fist snarling his guts, and he leaned back in his chair and flicked his eyes up toward the ceiling, and for just a moment he catalogued everything about her, without even looking: the soft metronome hiss of her breath between her lips and the impatient little boot tap of her shoes against the floor, one two three _onetwo_, the same cadence he remembered from his time as a student in her classroom.

Back then, the toe tap had usually been aimed at Seifer.

"I can't get ahold of the Lunar Base."

Her frown sketched a shallow little eleven between her eyebrows. "How long have they been out of contact?"

"A few days."

"I was under the impression that it was normal for interference from a nearby gravitational well to intercept satellite transmissions and prevent them from reaching anything much farther beyond the station."

"It is normal, but they usually realize right away that their transmissions aren't going through and adjust them. I've been keeping in close contact with them since Rinoa was sealed up, and they've never been out of contact more than a couple of days. It could just be a glitch, but I want to send a SeeD team up to check things out, just in case. I want you in charge. If…_something _is really wrong up there, I need to know I've got someone I can trust on site."

"You think it has something to do with Rinoa?" Quistis asked quietly, the shallow shadow-etched eleven deepening.

He sat forward to rest both elbows on his desk and dropped his face into his hands, rubbing his forehead and the jagged lip of his scar. "I don't know. I'm just being paranoid, probably."

'Understandable." She leaned across the desk to lightly touch his arm, resting her fingers there just long enough for him to feel those thin lines of heat go all the way through him. "You look terrible," she said gently. "When was the last time you slept?"

"I don't know," he answered honestly. "A few days, maybe."

"You're not going to win the war by keeling over at your desk, Squall. Get some rest. I'll prepare a team in the morning; we'll take care of whatever is going on up there."

He pulled his hands from his face and set them down with a frown: a pulse of his right hand squeezed the knuckles into pale half moons, as white as her face. "Are _you _all right?"

Quistis sighed and adjusted her posture into something as rigidly straight-backed as the mast of a ship. "Fine. A decent night's rest is a hard thing to come by, for any of us. I'm just tired."

He balled up his other fist, let the fingers flicker back out into regimentally neat rows on the oil-gleaming surface of his paper-scattered desk. "You don't…need to talk?"

She raised an eyebrow at him and a little amused dimple of a smirk dug itself into her cheek. "I must be tired- my brain is resorting to auditory hallucinations. I thought you just asked me if I wanted to talk."

He slid the regimentally neat rows of his white-banded fingers across the desk toward her hand, skating delicately past it like he was just reaching for the pen that lay beside it, a hideous pink-fuzzed monstrosity of a thing that Selphie had insisted would 'turn his frown upside down!'

"I…uh…did. I just thought…" He trailed off with another frown, flipping the pen between his fingers to the other hand, tapping a nervous little drum roll on the edge of his desk with it before looking up into her soft corner-creased eyes.

Her smile hit him between the ribs like a sledgehammer, and for once he could sympathize with Almasy, just a little: the man never had a chance.

"I was just teasing, Squall. Thank you for the offer, but I'm just going through a few…personal issues."

The fist in his guts wrenched something there inside out, and a nervous hack of a throat clear twitched the collar of his uniform jacket buttoned up to his throat, uncomfortably tight. A card trick flicker of his hand undid the top button, and he took a breath like a man drowning, sliding his eyes away from her.

He could hear the frown in her voice. "I didn't mean to imply I couldn't talk to you about personal issues. Seifer and I had a fight before I came here, and I don't think it's fair to discuss it with-"

"Someone he hates." Squall kept both eyes on the picture of his son, a tiny blanket-swaddled bulge folded between his arms. He could just barely make out the solitary sun-colored spike of Zell's hair peeking into the photo behind them, washed-out like everything else: soft painter's smudges of colors all running together, the beach and the sky and the hazy human-shaped silhouettes layered over the tops of all the dunes. "Just don't…" He trailed off and wiped an oily fingerprint smear from the photograph. Zell's, probably; he couldn't keep his hands to himself if you held a gun to the idiot's sack.

"Don't?" Quistis prompted, lacing her hands together on top of his desk.

"Uh…never mind. It's late. You look tired. Maybe…spend the night in your own dorm room tonight. So Seifer doesn't…uh, bother you."

She stood up with a sigh, flattening one hand back over her hair like that one casual pass of her palm could fix it. "Seifer's always bothering me. If I don't go back and talk to him, he'll show up here. I don't want him charging around the hallways after curfew, waking everyone up. Just because I probably won't get any sleep tonight doesn't mean everyone else should be deprived of it as well." Her lips thinned out around the edges, going as bloodless as her cheeks. "Is there anything else you wanted to talk to me about?"

"What?"

"You could have waited until the morning to tell me about the Lunar Base. We won't be able to get a team together until then, anyway. Is there something else you wanted to discuss?"

He thought about the picture locked away in his drawer and the woman standing in front of him now, and the tangled jumble of his confusion, all knotted up inside him.

He pasted on a thin fragile ghost of a smile and shifted his pen to the other hand again: back and forth and back and forth, like the cyclic tick tick tick of the motion could loosen up everything he couldn't and wouldn't say, because Seifer had gotten there first.

Something that tasted like vomit and old blood froze up on his tongue, a thin frost-layer of all his clumsy confessions and resolute arguments, like he could reason her away from Seifer Almasy, like all he needed to loosen the stranglehold that asshole had somehow clamped down around her heart was a few rationalizations, something to make her see reason.

A rough swallow pulled his voice back up into his throat, and he set the pen down on his desk. "No. I was just…I just couldn't stop thinking about it, and I wanted to give you a heads up. I didn't want to spring it on you last minute, in case- uh, in case I couldn't get ahold of you tomorrow or something." He could always get ahold of her- she was always available when it was his number that flashed a little insistently blinking reminder of her duties across the faceplate of her phone. The precisely cocked angle of her right eyebrow told him that she was thinking exactly the same thing, and he cleared his throat and looked down at both hands.

Her chair scraped a long knife-squeal of an adjustment across the floor. "I'm sure it's nothing, Squall. Rinoa is…Rinoa understands what you did. She wouldn't have wanted anything else."

* * *

><p>His heart is a scar tissue knot in his chest, and he wishes he could tell her it's not all because of Rinoa, but her exit is already a soft little click that echoes through the hallway behind it, and it is all he can do to keep staring down at his hands without blinking-<p>

His knuckles are scattered stars of pink-healing flesh, puckered up along the edges.

Going soft along the palms, though, calluses melting away into the manicured desk-job velvet of an office worker.

He picks the pen up. Flicks it back and forth between pointer and middle finger, rolls it down into the web between thumb and pointer and lets it rest there, winking lampglow back at him.

Lionheart is always within reach, propped up against his desk in its case like he even uses it anymore, and a casual twist at the waist and flick of his wrist pops the latch and swings the lid back, and now he just sits there with that pen right where he left it studying his face in the shining spit-polished mirror that is his weapon.

His scar tissue heart is thawing into something warm and loose and liquid, and he feels it puddling in his gut in little oozing drops that burn all the way down.

_-squall did you put me on this team because you hated me-_

He can hear her voice so clearly it is more than an echo inside his head, it is _here_, right now, he is actually _listening _to her, for the first time in a year-

"Rinoa?" Shock scrapes his tongue from the roof of his mouth and a spastic twitch jumps the pen from his hand and slams his foot into the base of Lionheart's case; a one-handed lunge just barely stops its fall in time.

_-squall-_

_-I wanna go there where squall and I promised-_

"_Rinoa_?"

Soft eyes and a softer smile: brown-streaked black framing cheekbones he can still remember cradling-

He has seen her a million times in his dreams and his nightmares and his fantasies, but all hazy around the edges, like she is a discolored photograph fading more and more and more each day, slipping bit by bit through the sieve of his memory-

But now she is _here_, she is _solid_- if he just leans across the desk and stretches out his arm she will become more than ghost vapor beneath his fingertips- he will feel soft cotton-rippled folds of her favorite duster and the subtle flare of her waist into even subtler hips-

Her face breaks into a smile like the sun coming up. "Squall. Where's Ellone?"

* * *

><p>"So you…how should I put this delicately for the lady's sake…<em>made love <em>on your kitchen floor like two Wendigos in heat, and then she just took off?"

Seifer leaned forward to press his elbows into his thighs, frowning. "Yeah. To fucking _Squall_."

Beside him on the couch, Ellone shifted hard enough to lurch the cushion underneath him, and Zell glanced over in time to see both hands coil into fists on her knees. A peripheral check told him Seifer was too absorbed in studying his own hands to notice anything he did, so he slid a hand forward over the fist closest to him and squeezed, leaning in close enough that the other two couldn't hear him. "Hey, you ok?"

She offered him a sickly flicker of a smile, and squeezed back. "I'm ok. I'm just feeling a little under the weather right now."

"Look, Almasy, far be it for me to point out the obvious, but I think the fact that she rode your dong instead of Squall's…uh, made a searing soul connection with your…soul…kinda' proves that she's interested in _you_, not him. You gotta' stop bein' so paranoid, man. It's just gonna' piss her off. And not that I have to tell you this, but I really wouldn't want to poke that particular bear, if I were you. Seen Quisty accomplish great things with that whip of hers, when she's really ticked off."

"No shit- she accomplished most of them on me."

Zell eased himself back against the couch and lifted one arm to drape it casually across the cushion behind Ellone, surreptitiously wiping sweat from the palm he eased off her pale knuckles.

"Anyway, thing is I knew several guys back at G. Garden who were foolin' around, usually had a couple of things goin' on the side at any one time, and they didn't have sex with their girlfriends anymore, or rarely, anyway, because they were gettin' it from somewhere else, you know? You're just bein' a dumbass about all this- if you didn't have your head so far up your ass, you'd see the way she looks at you, and you'd never worry about Squall again."

"I'm not _worried _about that little queer."

Irvine guffawed. "Oh, sure, and you're over here whinin' about getting in a fight with Quisty about him because you had nothing better to do, like _sleeping_. Like to point out this is what normal people are doing at this time of the morning."

Seifer flapped his hand at the lanky sharpshooter, thumb to the pads of the rest of his fingers, a scowl on his face and his free hand buried in the hair at the nape of his neck. "You weren't fucking sleeping."

"How the hell do you know that?"

"Because I can see your house from mine, dipshit, and all the lights were on, and something way too fucking tall to be Chicken Wuss and way too skinny to be the dog was walking around in the living room."

Irvine leaned back in his chair and draped one ankle across his opposite knee, lacing both hands behind his head.

"Why don't you just go find her and apologize for acting like a dickhole? Uh…_peehole_," Zell amended, glancing at Ellone again.

A whiplash jerk of his neck brought Seifer's narrowed eyes around to zero in on Zell, for just a moment, and then the lines around his scar ironed themselves out and faded back into the edge of his scalp, and Zell watched the threat in his gaze scatter and peter out. "Fuck. You all right, Ellone?"

The quarter-moon arch of her profile that was all he could see of her face right now showed him the pale protrusion of her color-bled lips, and the shimmering sweat-beads strung out along them. "Ellone?" He touched her shoulder.

Irvine's eyebrows came together in a frown. "You're lookin' awful pale, sweetheart. Need to go lay down or something?"

Seifer smirked. "We understand if sitting that close to Wuss is making you physically ill."

"Hey, up yours!"

She gave them all a weak watered-down wisp of a thing that used to be her smile, and something clenched hard inside of him. "I'm ok, I promise. I'm just not feeling well- I think I ate something bad."

"You sure?" Zell prodded.

She turned her smile on him and tipped her head down to rest it against his shoulder, and the knot inside him peeled itself apart, just slightly. "I just want to sit here with you. If I start feeling worse, I'll go upstairs and lay down."

Seifer rolled his eyes. Irvine scrubbed the smile from his lips with the back of his hand before swinging his attention back around to the scowling blonde, re-fastening his fingers. "Buy her something shiny, man."

"That doesn't work with Quistis."

"Just tell her you're wrong- she always like to hear that."

Seifer's scowl burrowed deeper into his cheeks. "You're fucking telling me I'm wrong to get pissed that every time I'm home, that asshole has her tied up for _days_, and she can't take a three second break to come see me before I head back out to get my ass blown off?"

"_I _wouldn't want to see you, if I was Quisty," Zell added with a snicker. "I'd enjoy all the time not having to see your face, you know?"

"If you don't shut the fuck up, I'm going to fist you in the asshole with the cowboy's hand."

"Why the Hyne-damned hell does my hand have to get dragged into this?"

"Do you really think I'm going to use _my _hand?"

"You know, I kinda' think if you're gonna' be slippin' _anything _in the back door, then yeah, man, you should be courteous and use your own." A discreet throat clear put enough of a pause in the conversation to throw off Seifer's reply, and Irvine inclined his head in Ellone's direction. "Sorry, Sis."

She smiled wanly again, and pushed herself back upright using Zell's shoulder for leverage. "Do you guys have any aspirin? Headache," she explained, getting shakily to her feet.

Zell nodded toward the hallway. "It's in the bathroom just past Irvine's room. Are you sure- I mean, you look-"

"I just need something to get my head to stop hurting. I'll be ok then."

"Ok." He glanced up to see Seifer watching her with a frown, and half a lean forward put him at precisely the right angle to bring both elbows down on his knees, mirroring his friend's posture.

Seifer waited until she had disappeared to open his mouth. "Was she like that earlier?"

Irvine shrugged. "Seemed fine to me. Dincht cooked tonight, though, so she probably does have food poisoning. Eleven years of military food has pretty much made me immune to that sorta' crap, and you know Dincht- doesn't matter if it's moldly or he just got it out of the garbage and it's got half a worm hanging out of it, he'll eat it."

"I only did that _once_! It was the only friggin' hot dog the cafeteria served in _weeks_, and some idiot just threw it away!"

"Still disgusting." Irvine's eyes narrowed themselves into something shrewdly contemplative. "Why?"

"I think you should check on her," he said, pulling himself up out of his slouch.

"What? Why? You think she's really sick? I'm not really all that good at dealing with puke- I mean, you guys both know I'm really manly and stuff, but dude, that just gets me- smelling it or seeing it or hearing it or anything, it makes me want to throw up too."

Seifer popped a knuckle and looked down at it with a frown. "I don't think she has food poisoning."

The knot in Zell's chest winched itself tight again, gathering up any loose trailing ends. "What, you think-" He cut himself off, swallowed, tried again. "She's been fine for a while now. Dr. Kadowaki released her and everything. She's _fine_." He could hear how much he wanted to believe that in his own voice.

"I think," Seifer said quietly, and something in the tone of his voice wrapped Zell's chest up even tighter, molding it up against his spine, "she looks like I used to feel. When that bitch was poking around in my head."

Irvine loosened his hands and bent forward far enough to put himself into the dim halo of lampshadow flickering off the far wall, the pale new-growing fringe of his eyebrows bunching themselves together. "Kadowaki wasn't even sure what was wrong with her- we can't jump to conclusions, you know? That's not fair to Ellone, get her locked up like-"

"Like Rinoa?" Seifer interrupted, scratching the back of his neck. "Maybe she should be."

"_Hey_!" Zell snapped. "What the hell are you saying?"

"Fuck, it's not like I _want _her to be, but Adel wanted her, and Ultimecia did too, not to mention she spent how long down in the labs with that sick fuck? She's tied up in all that sorceress shit, whether you want her to be or not."

"She's _fine_." He had lost some of the conviction in his voice, and a long shaky hiss of an inhale could not bring it back. "I mean, yeah, there was some weird stuff going on earlier, but Rinoa's _gone_, Seifer, and she's the only sorceress left, so Ellone's going to be fine."

"She's in forced hibernation. She's not gone. They're never _gone _until you kill the bitches."

A hot surge climbed from his gut up into his throat and now he had both feet underneath him and his hands in fists along his sides, shaking. "Don't fucking talk about her like that! She was our friend, you asshole- you _dated_ her-"

"She's not your fucking friend anymore. She's not _Rinoa_, you moron. You don't fucking get it- there was hardly anything left of Matron by the time that cunt was done with her. And now Rinoa's the same, except whatever's in her is a lot stronger. Odine got ahold of her, and he doesn't get his hands on anything and _not _severely fuck with it."

"All right, Dincht, just siddown. Everybody calm down, all right?"

"Go check on her," Seifer snapped. "You don't think _I _of all people maybe know what the fuck I'm talking about?"

Irvine lifted one shoulder and let it fall again. "Can't hurt. She's probably just pukin' her guts out right now, poor woman. But, you know…he's got a point. She'd seem fine for a few days while she was stayin' in the infirmary, and then all of a sudden she'd just flip out again. No one knows what's goin' on, Dincht. No one's gonna' hurt her, though, all right? So you can stop trying to decide if you're going to smear Almasy's face across the floor."

* * *

><p>Seifer watched Zell stalk off without a word and popped another knuckle. He stared down at it, a little web-fine constellation of old scar tissue rippling up like undulations of beach dune, getting all carved up under white-nuclear noon.<p>

Irvine's chair signaled his conspiratorial shift forward with a dry whisper of a creak, and Seifer lifted his eyes from all the knots and furrows of keloid-scabbed pink that made up his hands. "You think…Rinoa's got somethin' to do with what's goin on with Sis? She's not supposed to be able to hurt anyone anymore."

Seifer popped another knuckle, straight down the line of all those crooked little humps, crack crack fucking crack like all his old man bones in his young soldier's body, going brittle before their time. "Matron used to tell me sometimes…when she was in control, which wasn't often, or for long…she used to say that it was ok, that she was going to protect all of us, that she wasn't going to let Ultimecia hurt anyone else. Especially me." He pulled his eyes away from his uneven knuckles and brought one hand up to rub his scar, focusing on the wall over his friend's shoulder. "And then she'd go away, and that bitch would be back, and she'd pump me full of a couple of Firaga, burn the skin off my chest, realign my jaw, pull out all my teeth…whatever the fuck she wanted to. She could always put me back together again, no matter what she did. She didn't want any of it to be permanent, you know- couldn't have her lap dog broken forever." He could feel his frown wrinkle up his forehead scar underneath his fingertips. Irvine stared at him.

"What I think is that we're all fucked."

A soft carpet-muffled swish of feet coming back up the hallway confirmed his prediction just a moment later, when a white-cheeked Zell Dincht stumbled back into the living room with no color in his face and both hands in fists at his sides.

"Ellone's gone."

**A/N: And now, ladies and gentlemen, the shit hits the fan. (Again.)**


	21. Interlude Ten

**A/N: I know I've been a little more lax than usual in updating, but I'm still around and kicking. I've just been really busy these last couple of weekends and haven't had time to post. The story's still coming along fine on weekdays, and I think this weekend I'm finally free, so I think I should have another full chapter ready to go by then. Hope you guys are still enjoying! Thanks for reading.**

_Dear Selphie,_

_I was at Cid's the other day watchin the kids playing and I know I've already brought this up before, but it's just somethin I can't stop thinking about, you know? I'm watchin them all and I'm jealous, Selph, of some Hyne-damned kids, but the thing is, they're all playing along the shoreline and throwin seaweed and arguing about who's going to be 'it' and all I can think is that shoulda' been us, we shoulda' had that type of childhood, for a lot longer than we did. They took bein' kids away from us way too soon, and they did it on purpose. The GF's, all a that- they knew what they would do to our memories, and they tried to force them on us all anyway, as soon as possible so we'd forget all about the orphanage and Matron and each other, so we could kill her and watch each other die for the greater good without sufferin' any pangs. _

_ I was with Quisty when I found this out, and I put on a good face for her, but you don't know how much it hurt, Selph honey, finding that out. It was like…all we were to them was some means to an end, not kids or human beings with feelings at all, but just a couple a' legends in the making: like I'm just a trigger and Zell's a pair of fists, and Squall with Lionheart and Quisty with her whip, and you with those little things you used to whip around like nobody's business…that's all we were to them. Forget the individual- that's what bein a soldier's about, isn't it? Forget anything that makes you unique, just grab a number and fall into line and don't cry when the guy next to you gets his head blown off, don't even think about it, 'cause when it's your job to kill people, you don't get the benefit of havin' feelings. That's what they used to tell me at Galbadia, and I was never very good at it, but I tried- I didn't really have any friends, stayed away from everyone, kept all my women before you to one night stands, so I wouldn't get attached, so I could keep goin on with the misson even if one a them died in my arms just a few minutes before the objective. _

_ But there was always you, and Cid,and Matron and all the others, and I could never let go of that little house and that beach and your smile, and I know that's part of what makes me a lousy soldier, shooting skills aside. And I'm not gonna' lie, Selph: part of what kept me going was memories of that house and that beach, and Cid and Matron who took us all in when we had nobody else to love us, and there was always this part of me that thought man, if I could just _see_ everyone again, I'd be happy. But it wasn't true, because none of you even remembered me, and that hurt worse than never seeing you again. At least before at Galbadia I could pretend, you know? _

_ The one thing I thought I never had to pretend about was that Cid and Matron loved us. Maybe the rest of you were out there somewhere happy without me, maybe you remembered and didn't care about me, or maybe you'd forgotten me altogether, or maybe you were all dead- I never knew. But I knew Matron and Cid loved us just like if we'd been their own children, and havin that made me get up just one more day, try just one more time, until everything just sorta ran together into this routine I could maintain, even if I was dyin on the inside sometimes. And now the thing is…I can't help wondering if it was all a lie, if we were always intended for this life, if from the very first moment I stepped into that house and Matron held out her arms to me and gave me this still-warm brownie right from the oven and put me to bed that night and didn't leave until I was asleep, because I was too scared to go to sleep without her…was that her humorin me, because it was my 'destiny', because I had to end up at one of the Gardens no matter what, no matter if I wanted to do somethin else with my life or if maybe I wasn't even cut out for their plans. _

_ Because I'm not, you know, Selph. I ain't a soldier. Not a very good one, anyway. I think about that everyday and how much I want out of this life, and you know, I just gave Quisty this big lecture on how she couldn't let Garden drag her down out of the kind of life she deserved, because maybe it was all she'd ever known, but I believed in her, I believed she could go on to do something else and start a family and not get caught up in this endless little whirlwind of death and killing and goin to sleep at night wonderin when it's all going to come full circle on your ass- but the thing is, I can't seem to apply the same ideas to myself._

_ I'm a trigger. That's what they wanted me to be and that's what I am, and maybe it's the only part of soldierin' I'm good at, but I'm damned good at it, and it's the _only _thing I'm good at. _

_ Maybe I just lost the will to try and start another life when you died. Maybe there's just no ambition there anymore, because I can't picture gettin gray on a porch next to anyone else._

_ Selphie, I wish…I guess it doesn't matter what I wish anymore. I'm stuck, Selph honey, and I don't know how to get out of any of this. I'm tired of it. I'm so tired, some days I just want to lay down and not get up again, and I know you'd hate to hear me talk like that, but it's true. I just can't stop being scared of losing someone else, and that wears at a man after awhile, you know? I can't stop thinking about standing over another coffin in the rain with water running off my hat but not outta' my eyes, because everything's too frozen up for me to even process what the hell is goin on. I go to sleep, and I see Almasy slumping over in the mud in front of me, or Quisty layin' under one a' those X-ATM's like a little limp rag doll, and I can't see anything else, until I'm up outta' bed pacing it off. It's there every night, and all I can think is this is the rest of my life, however long it's gonna' turn out to be, and it makes me _sick_, Selph, it really does._

_ And then I think about how selfish I'm being, because if it wasn't us it would be some other kids, or if it wasn't us, maybe things woulda' gone all wrong and then where would the world be, under Ultimecia's thumb with time broken all over the place, where would _we _be- maybe we'd all be dead and no better off anyway. _

_ But I still can't help thinking about it. _

_ I hope you don't have any regrets, wherever you are, the way I do. Thing with you, Selph, was that maybe you weren't really cut out to be a soldier either, but you always made the best out of everything. And you poured your heart into everything you did, designing all those festivals and everything, playin' matchmaker so everyone could be 'as happy as I am with my Irvy'. And maybe I wish things hadn't turned out the way they did, maybe I wish I'd gotten to grow up the way those kids are, gradually, a little at a time, but I want you to know that if not goin to Garden, if not goin through everything I've been through meant that I'd have never gotten the time with you that I did, I'd do everything over again. In a heartbeat. G. Garden, sniper training, puking my guts out after my first kill- it was all worth it if it was the only way I could be with you, Selph. _

_ Love,_

_ Irvine_


	22. Chapter Eleven

**A/N: Hey guys; I'm going out of town this weekend, so since I had some time left over tonight, I thought I'd upload this now so I could make sure to get it out there before I leave. Thanks as always for your kind reviews; long, short, in-between, I appreciate them all, and thank you so much for taking the time to leave them.**

**Chapter Eleven**

Balamb Garden

Balamb

Something intristic that is buried alive in every soldier, waiting to go off, thumped in her chest and a long slow slide of a hesitant step forward brought her to a halt mid-stride, mid-corridor.

She fingered the smoothly oiled coil of her whip at her side, and a coolly contemplative squint of her eyes brought the night-shadowed hall into focus around her, resolving it into anonymous lumps of bodies in the dark, piled where they had fallen.

Something snarled itself in her stomach and punched its way up into her chest, and a tentative toe to the formless pile to her left flipped it bonelessly onto its back and moved the snarl in her stomach to her throat: a card trick flicker of her hand slipped her phone from her pocket into her hand.

It took him only three rings to pick up. "Get over to Garden. Bring Zell and Irvine. _Now_."

* * *

><p>She does not wait for a reply. She is too busy sighing breaths between her teeth, one, two, three, inhale Quistis inhale, to hang around long enough for his response.<p>

There are bodies everywhere she looks. Some of them are only motionless swellings in the night, curled up like they are merely napping where they have fallen, but it is not these she cannot take her eyes away from.

She remembers seeing corpses like this once, in a fairytale castle in the clouds: all angled contortions of red-smeared tongues that poke up through layers of cable-frayed connective tissue. Clown's smiles of wounds, freshly made-up: they are strewn all across the floor between her and the entryway, missing throats and eyes and limbs, painting scarlet the hand-polished tiles underneath her boots.

Everything around her runs red. It is all one long smear of nightmare she cannot escape, and there was never even any _hint _of an alarm, all these cadets, all these _children_-

Inhale inhale _inhale_-

He will be here any moment, she tells herself- the alarm in her voice will have sent him running, no matter the tension between them, and then she will not be alone, then he will be at her side, bright and brash and over-confident-

It takes her a moment to understand that the knot of nausea in her stomach is not merely a byproduct of all this blood, and this realization buckles her knees underneath her and swings one hand up toward the wall, and she doesn't have _time _for this sort of weakness-

Squall.

* * *

><p>Garden is a fucking slaughterhouse. He's got his phone in one hand and Hyperion in the other, and <em>fuck it<em>, she's not picking up, what the goddamned _hell _is going on here-

"Almasy."

Zell's voice twists his head around with the phone still to his ear, and something that is already warm and loose and watery inside of him goes even slacker: the body Dincht lifts up with a distasteful little grimace is a fucking mess, red-splattered pudding for a face and an uneven little necklace of finger-shaped bruises across its throat, splashed in striations of pink-peeling burn marks.

He drops the phone.

The burn marks are magic wounds, and there is only one woman in the world with the kind of juice to leave this sort of destruction in her wake.

He takes off running down the corridor.

He does not pick up his phone.

* * *

><p>She's got her best Instructor's voice on by the time he reaches Squall's office: patiently reasoning, a voice that soothes cadets and colleagues alike back from the thundering blood-soaked cliff edge that is combat raging all around them before they are ready for it.<p>

He's never had any problems with that cliff: he has always hurled himself right off the end of it without even thinking, blade raised, teeth peeled back in something blood-painted and shining and indistinct, because his enemies never quite know if it is a grimace or a pleasant smile he flashes from beneath red-soaked lips.

He is half a millisecond away from that cliff right now, Hyperion slanted to ready and his leg muscles all tensed up like they have already leapt, and it is the rest of him that has not quite caught up yet-

And her white-bleached fingers on the edge of Pubes' desk pull him back from that edge and toss him down on his ass among scrub and dirt and corpse-litter, and all he can do is flatten himself down and ride it out and keep his mouth fucking shut, because there is something delicate and deadly and close to the tipping point going on here, and it's _killing _her-

And he can't even shatter it, or they're all dead.

Pubes leans one hand down against his desk and coils the other around Lionheart, like he's not sure what the hell he's supposed to do, and from here Seifer can see just a sliver of his face, all knotted up like he is in pain, except for his eyes: flat cataract-webbed doll's glass, like everything inside of him has been suctioned away, and he fucking _knows _this look, he has seen it before-

More than that, he has lived it, and a tiny white-hot sliver of something she left behind that has never quite dissolved from his soul quivers and shifts and slips in between his ribs, hammering itself home like a knife going for his heart.

"Squall, listen to my voice. Do not listen to her. Focus on what I'm saying. You can do it, Squall," she soothes, and he lets that patiently reasoning voice be the thread he keeps a hand around, all the way back into the light, even though it is meant for someone else.

She can barely hold herself up, and she is still trying to help.

"_Ellone!_" That's from Wuss of course, crowding in behind him, and now he notices something he missed in the initial half-second eye flicker that was all he passed over the scene before all his soldier's instincts and his muscles seized him by the throat to override his common sense and nearly throw him face first into something he barely even understands, the way he does everything.

There is a pile of cloth at Rinoa's feet that resolves into something vaguely human-shaped the longer he looks at it, and a hand inside his gut slowly pulls everything tight around its fingers, like it is winding up a skein: streaks of sun-bleach layered over folds of dull-dirt brown, a half-moon of corpse white underneath it, and he gets it half a second before Zell takes the lunge he just barely stopped himself from making.

Something unfurls itself like a hand coming loose from a fist and ensnares Wuss, and the pure kinetic force of whatever the fuck she has just cast at him picks him up and shakes him like a naughty child and throws him with a muffled meat-thud of a slap into the far wall.

Quistis' legs slither out from underneath her and it is Leonhart and not him there to catch her, and now he watches static electricity build itself like a hurricane around Rinoa, lifting all the hairs on his arms as he feels its discharge backwash against him.

Zell rolls over and moans and is helped up to an elbow by Irvine, crouching beside him.

His mouth is full of blood when he tips his head back up off the floor.

* * *

><p>The ceiling is a white-webbed smear of black above her: she blinks it back into focus, only this is not possible, because it keeps sliding away from her and painting itself into little wet-gleaming stripes that glisten charcoal against all those layers of midnight, but there is still one thing she can see clearly enough:<p>

He is just a shapeless silver smudge crowned in blond, coronal white flame that flares bright bright brighter, and it isn't until he turns his head away and all that nuclear sun-glow fades slowly back into just gold that she realizes he is looking at her.

"I need a Knight, Squall. They said I have to have one. I'm not going to hurt you- don't you love me? They said you didn't anymore, that you were just pretending the whole time, but I don't believe that. I couldn't have just imagined everything!"

His arms beneath her back tighten painfully, but she cannot protest, because everything inside of her is so broken and burned and scattered about in pieces she cannot even speak, through all the layers and layers of pain. She is the same coronal white flame of his hair, only this flame is consuming all of her, chewing acid-burning wires of agony through every sinew and socket and half-conscious blink, and just a fractional shift of Squall's hands sends something howling loose inside of her-

He is stepping forward: that is what has broken loose inside of her.

He has begun the same marionette procession she remembers from that television station, all awkward newborn limbs that do not quite know how to function anymore, outside of the strings pulling them-

_-if she had just reached out a hand gotten there a moment sooner if she had just _tried _but she never did did she she gave up on him just like everyone did because he was too reckless and disobedient and rash-_

"Seifer, _don't_!" Her voice finds itself hard enough to flinch Squall just slightly back away from her, but she cannot let this happen again- he's been _saved_, he is going to be _hers_, for the rest of their lives-

"_Seifer_-"

* * *

><p>There is a little bit of ugly inside of everyone, no matter how good-natured or beautiful the outside.<p>

He is mostly cesspit inside. The majority of him wants one thing: Quistis in his house or his bed or his arms, who the fuck cares, as long as it is his, and fuck everything else-

But there is still Wuss screaming on the floor and Ellone three feet above him in Rinoa's arms now, and that black well gape of a voice, pulling all the strings inside him, and he cannot be selfish forever.

The thing about this choice is he can never unmake it. He has already had his will bent to this forge once and it left little slivers of him shivering all over the floor, but maybe there is a little bit of clean-running water in that cesspit after all, because he is considering doing it anyway, even now that he's got something to lose-

He looks over at her struggling upright in Squall's arms, her mouth pursed on his name, and all he can do for a moment is just stare, seeing behind his eyelids little cinematic snapshots of their life together, the way he wants it: it is all distilled down into her eyes and her smile and her hair, sliding in little silk-sleek rivulets between his fingers, because in the end it all comes down to one little thing:

All he wanted was a fucking house by the sea, with her in it.

Ellone's head flops over and swings loosely and behind him Zell makes several frantic scrabbling attempts to get back on his feet, and there is so much naked pain in his eyes for this woman he hasn't gotten to love long enough that Seifer feels it like a goddamned blow to his chest.

He slides one boot forward and in his hand Hyperion swings downward to stick the tip squealing upright in the floor, and the funny thing is he doesn't even remember doing this: like someone else is holding this weapon that is suddenly far too heavy for his arm.

And the same someone else blinks stinging wet heat from his eyes and takes a knee on the mirror-polished tiles of Squall Leonhart's office and keeps those wet heat-stinging eyes on Ellone Andrin's frightened tear-streaked face, because it is the only thing that reminds him why the fuck he is doing this.

There is gravel in his voice that he can't seem to cough free.

"I'll do it."

* * *

><p><em>No<em>.

Everything inside of her flips over and tumbles down, and the hell with this knot of nausea crawling up her throat and pushing insistently against her lips: she assembles her legs underneath her somehow, and a spike of adrenaline tears her free of his arms and slams her up against the desk, and now the protest screaming inside her head rips itself free of her lips for real:

"_No_."

She makes a grab for the collar of his coat and the fringe of blond down visible just above it, and a casual backward swipe of one arm sends her spinning away, back into Squall, who has followed her out from behind the desk.

"Seifer _no_-"

"Shut _up_!" he snarls, and the arm he has just used to clear her out of his way like she is nothing, a gnat circling his head, drapes itself down across his thigh and now that fringe of blond down drops with the rest of his head, and all she is left with is the sun-darkened strip of neck between collar and hair-

A man offering up his head to the executioner's axe: this is what he reminds her of.

"Leonhart doesn't know what the fuck he's doing. He'll be a shitty Knight. Take me."

Rinoa's brow wrinkles into lines of confusion that carve her face up like a time-cracked statue, and in her arms Ellone swings her terrified gaze out over the floor, toward Zell propped up in his friend's careful embrace.

"Rinoa, please don't-"

Seifer cuts her off as he stands, hefting Hyperion up across his shoulders. "You don't need Ellone. You need someone to protect you."

And now understanding is a cold dead star inside her, sucking up everything in its path.

He is not tangled up in her web after all- he is offering himself up as sacrifice, and she is just selfish enough to want it to be anyone but him.

* * *

><p>He does not lift his arm to wipe his eyes. She is too preoccupied with whatever the fuck is going on inside her head to pay enough attention to any emotional turmoil in her wanna-be lapdog anyway.<p>

He will not look back at Quistis; just a half second glance will be enough to steal all the resolve in his heart and the courage from his hands, stone-steady on the handle of his weapon and his hip, and he can't fucking stand to see Wuss' face again anyway, because he's pretty fucking sure this is not going to work out the way any of them want it to.

"No, I need her too. Ellone has to come."

"Fine," he says like it's no never-fucking-mind to him, and he wonders if anyone else can hear the catch in his voice. "Take her with us. But you need someone who knows what they're doing."

"But you betrayed us before."

"Ultimicea tricked me, and it pissed me off. This time I'm offering myself up freely. Give me a chance to prove myself. If I don't, then just kill me- what do you give a fuck?"

"I don't want to kill you- I used to know you, didn't I? I mean, I _think _I did. You look familiar. I don't want to hurt anyone, I just don't understand why I was left up there all alone? They said none of you loved me, that you were all jealous of me, that you were trying to kill me- but that's not true, is it?"

"Rinoa," Squall says quietly from the side of his desk, where he has kneeled to catch Quistis' half-faint across his thigh, "It's not true. We didn't abandon you. You were afraid that you might hurt someone; we did it for everyone's protection-"

"But I _don't _want to hurt anyone!" she explodes, and an instinctive backward flinch of Ellone's weakly swinging head scrapes Zell's feet up underneath him: his voice is a moist croak, woven in between all the clots his busted lip and nose have dropped onto his tongue.

"Rinoa, _don't_, _please_. Let Ellone go. You're hurting her now. Don't take her- if you really don't want to hurt anyone, then just leave, ok? We won't bother you- I swear to Hyne you'll never hear from any of us again, if that's what you want, but don't take either one of them, Rinoa, they're-"

"But I need them both," she whispers, clutching Ellone closer to her; her eyes latch onto Seifer's and he feels the strings inside of him go taut, and for just a moment honor and glory and immortalization all go singing and winging about inside of him, just the way they used to with his mother at his side.

"Seifer, please don't." Quistis' plea is just a thin pathetic thread of a thing, pulling him back into that light again, and this time he doesn't flinch back from it or have to think twice: she's taking Ellone no matter what any of them do or how many of them die or how badly she doesn't want to hurt anyone-

But at least she will not go alone.

He stretches out his hand and shifts Hyperion off the knot in the shoulder it is digging into, and he says the one thing that he knows she wants to hear most:

"If you take me with you, you won't ever be alone again, Rinoa. I'll go wherever the fuck you want me to, all right? Just take me with you."

There is an entire meteor fall inside his head.

An open-handed slap chews a line of white-shimmering heat flash across his eyes, but it's not a physical blow after all: just little tentative feelers of her magic, trying to assess any threat.

She finds none or she is too goddamned lonely to care, who the fucks knows, because suddenly there is a slender blood-damp hand inside his own and a halo around all three of them that flares white, brighter, nuclear, and now all he can hear is screaming like a bomb going off inside his head.

That's Quistis, and it snaps his resolve and pulls his head around after all, and the only thing between him and her red-glistening face being held up by Squall's shaking hands- she is bleeding fucking _everywhere_, nose, eyes, lips- is this little shimmering veil of white, flimsy enough for him to punch through-

"_Quistis_!"

Saying her name is like being spit out of Time Compression: like being born all over again, all raw and ripping and hot as the veil he tries to stick his hand through, and now he watches little white worms of tension begin to crawl up the fist he clenches on this side of the veil that is between them until the worms become stardust that shred apart and wink out, and suddenly-

* * *

><p>-he is not there at all anymore.<p>

They are all gone.

She is a hollow little skeleton in Squall Leonhart's arms, all carved inward-

There is nothing at all holding her up anymore.

* * *

><p>One Week Later<p>

Balamb

The air smelled like rain: that clean purity that is a _newness _to the world itself, like a paintbrush, or perhaps an eraser, has crept quietly into the scene overnight, scrubbing out everything, to be replaced with bright white blankness that will be painted over with a new layer, one day.

She sat on his front porch with her feet propped on the bottom step and her hands folded between her knees.

The front porch was not so undeniably _him _that she could not stand it, the way his house was.

The setting sun smeared blood across the sky.

Inside her pocket, her phone gave a little vibration that slapped it into the meat of her thigh through her pants: another missed call. She must have a dozen of them by now.

It didn't matter to her what any of them wanted.

A little three second flicker of lash and lid: that was how long it had taken her to lose him. And the thing was, she would never get him back, not this time, not when he had already shaken loose the hold of a sorceress once: you didn't come back from that sort of thing again, not intact, not unruined-

He would be all crushed inward and folded over and crumpled up, if he ever came back to her at all.

A ponderous lift of his head nudged Freeloader's skull beneath the tent of her hands, and something inside her chest broke apart; a convulsive clench of her palms just barely stilled the tremor that rippled all the way down them into the tips of her fingers.

The dog had been standing on the porch waiting for Seifer the first time she dropped by, sitting with his head tucked between his paws and his tail thumping out a staccato thunderbeat of a rhythm on the bone-creaking boards beneath him. When he was home on leave, Zell explained to her when she brought the dog home, Seifer always let him in around 1700 hours and fed him, then spent the next hour throwing a squeaky toy he swore up and down had been left behind by the previous owners, and not specifically bought by him for the enjoyment of the dog.

She had begun dropping by every night to wait with the dog; it made her feel just a little bit better, to know that she was not the only one doing so in vain.

She tipped her head back to blink up into the diffused blood-glow of dusk, running one hand absently across the animal's attention-pricked ears.

The phone inside her pocket vibrated up against her leg again, a little white-noise buzz that sucked her down and pulled her back and spun everything around her, until the sky was no longer artist's spackle in primary above her head-

* * *

><p>Great Plains of Galbadia<p>

Galbadian Missile Base

Five Years Ago

-the radio spits fuzz and she shakes it with a frown, like this little disciplinary flick of her wrist will whip it back into shape, and in the band of steel haze that is the sky above her head something darkens abruptly like a light going out-

And shimmering heat-waves of vaguely human-shaped silhouette that might just be desert mirage, if she does not focus too hard, resolve themselves into outlines of formidable soldier's muscle coming uncoiled, and across the sand from where she is kneeling, a head that glows white-nuclear against all this bland dull-glinting gold around them pops up from its hiding place.

"Seifer!" she hisses, clipping her useless radio back to her belt and motioning her student back down with a frantic little wave of her hand. "Get down!"

It is utterly predictable that he does not listen to her for a moment, that he barely even flicks a glance in her direction, but it is a little white-hot caldera that opens wide inside her chest nevertheless, because just for _once _she wishes he would defer to her like the good little damn cadet he is supposed to be.

"Fuck. Jelleyes. There's like a fucking hundred of them- where the hell are they all coming from?" His eyes are on the cloud of darkness blotting out the weak patchy gaps of sunlight in the sky overhead, and for just a moment, something inside her that is neither soldier nor instructor admires the muscles in his calves that she can see through the outline of his form-fitting Garden-issue pants. She is seventeen and has never been kissed, and she is still human -_woman_- enough to pay attention to this and the way he fills out the back of these form-fitting pants like Garden had him specifically in mind when designing its clothing.

It is just a shame the mouth attached to this body is so Hyne-damned awful.

Her scuttle across the sand toward him is an awkward half-crouch of a thing that cramps all the muscles in her thighs; she puts on her best I Am Not Pleased Sit Down Now Or Pay the Consequences voice and leans up against the little stone-carved storage hut that is supposed to be his cover, risking a brisk sprinter's start of a stand: all explosion and unfurling speed that swings a hand for the collar of his trench coat, and there is a flinching moment of surprise on his face to find her this close to him, this fast.

She pulls him down beside her and rests her back against the granite-cut curve of the storage unit, and now it is her turn to flinch slightly backward in shock: his face is a scant half inch from her own, all pulled up in the sneer that makes her want to smear his pretty boy nose across his face, and she stops her recoil an inch shy of banging her head against the wall behind her.

"Instructor, if you wanted to be alone with me, you could have just asked."

"You are to be strictly monitored during this exam after your actions during your first SeeD exam," she replies coolly, reaching down to shift the whip on her belt, as though it is absolutely imperative it hang perfectly parallel to the radio on her hip, still hissing feedback.

He slides down with his legs out straight in front of him and sets Hyperion casually across his lap, crossing one ankle over the other. "Where the fuck is everyone else?"

"Language, Cadet Almasy."

"Tongue fuck my asshole," he replies pleasantly. "Who are we supposed to kill, and when the fuck are they getting here? I've got sand fucking everywhere."

"It's too bad it didn't get in your mouth."

"It's there too- want to help me get it out?"

"Only if you choke to death in the process," she replies equally pleasantly.

"Tch- that's not very professional, Instructor. I'm going to have to report that one. I'm sure Headmaster Cid would love to hear that his biggest ass-kisser is going around threatening her students. Tell you what, though- I'll keep that mark off your perfect little record if you do something for me in return." He peels his lips back in a smile that hints enough at the nature of this 'something' that she uncoils her whip with the same calculated casualness with which he handles his own weapon, and fingers one of the barbs.

His smile flattens back into something genuine this time, and she realizes with a start that he has a little pockmark of a dimple in his left cheek, just shallow enough that she has never noticed it before, until this moment now, with a break in the cloud cover slanting sunlight down off the sand underneath them just right.

She wonders if anyone has ever kissed it before and what is _wrong _with her this is _Seifer Almasy_-

Perhaps puberty never fully kicked in with the development of her breasts and the arrival of her monthly cycle and the rest of it is just now showing up; she has never before noticed boys much after all, not unless they are across from her on a training mat and she is analyzing all their weak spots-

She shifts her crouch and clears her throat and looks away from him across the sand, to the wire-link fence between them and the strategically-positioned team on the other side, awaiting orders.

"Squads A and B are already in position. This is a classic maneuver you _should _have encountered already in the SeeD manual, page 45, section 1A-"

"'When encountering a small contingent of hostiles and manpower is limited, engage hostiles from several different vantage points if at all possible blah blah blah.' In terms those of us who aren't huge fucking nerds actually give a shit about, ambush the shit out of them, kill the shit out of them, and then get the fuck out. Why the hell isn't G. Garden taking care of this again anyway?"

She does not even bother to hide her surprise. "Martine doesn't take every contract Galbadia puts out. B. Garden always picks up a few here and there. And that's…excessively paraphrased of course, but essentially correct. We are to keep them alive if doing so does not present an undue risk to the entire team, however; Galbadia wants them interrogated. They've been having problems for months now with small terrorist factions here and there that have already caused fairly significant damage to some of their more important facilities, as I understand it. We are to capture only. Do _not _harm any of them unless your life or the life of a fellow SeeD is in immediate danger; protocol for this misson says that at least one prisoner must remain alive, even if the life of a fellow SeeD or two must be sacrificed in the process. Do you understand, Seifer?"

He snorts and smoothes one hand down the length of his gunblade, squinting up into the sky. "If only one of the dickholes is left alive and pulls a gun, I'm supposed to let him shoot you through the head instead of gutting him like the piece of shit he is."

"If you cannot subdue him without killing him, then yes; that goes for any of us, any of the instructors monitoring this exam and any of the cadets taking it. These exams are not test-runs, Seifer: they are life and death. It's what we signed up for."

She watches heat crawl up his neck into his cheeks, and now suddenly he is on his feet again, swinging Hyperion through a cut that is all blur and no substance, he is that fast; both shoulders twitch up and back like he is only loosening up his limbs, and another viper-quick strike chews through the air and whistles up against the side of the building like an axe coming down, chipping stone onto her head. "We didn't _sign up _for it."

She frowns and knots her fist around the handle of Save the Queen. "Seifer, sit down."

"None of us fucking signed up to get killed just because some fucking _protocol _says that some piece of shit terrorist is more important than us. Well, guess what, _Instructor_- they're not more goddamned important than me, and if one of them draws a bead on you, I'll rip his spine out and make him eat it."

"Sit _down_."

He stabs Hyperion into the sand underneath his boots and leans on the handle, frowning down at her. "Would you actually fucking let someone shoot me in the head if killing them to save my ass meant failing the mission?"

"Yes," she replies calmly, and for just one an eyeblink of a moment she watches something scrunch up his forehead and cloud over his eyes, and she thinks vaguely that it is time to change her prescription, because that cannot actually be _hurt _on his face- Seifer Almasy _has _no feelings beyond self-absorption-

"It's nothing personal," she feels obligated to add for some reason. "It's just the way things are, Seifer."

"You're a fucking robot," he snaps, and takes a knee in the sand beside her once again, setting his weapon down flat. "Does Cid even lube you up before he bends you over his desk, or does he just wrap it with the SeeD manual and go at you like the fucking whore that you are-"

Her slap is a gunshot crack that snaps his head back hard enough to send shivery little reverberations down her entire arm, feedback like the white noise still sizzling from the unit clipped to her belt; a fumbling failure of a grab completely misses it the first time, slides off it the second, and finally slams home the switch that snaps it off for good. "Don't you _ever _speak to me like that again." She could _strangle _him right here in this dusty little hell, leave his body to curl and crisp and dry up into wisps to be picked over by animals- he _deserves _it she _hates _this Hyne-damned _wannabe _who think he is so wonderful and smart and talented, who is taking a gigantic _shit _all over this career she has sacrificed everything for-

He brings the cuff of one sleeve up to wipe blood from the corner of his mouth and spits a bright teeth-thinned dribble of it into the sand beneath his knee. "Fucking hit me again and you're going to regret it. What else do you want me to call you? You sold your fucking _soul _to that place- what the fuck would Matron say if she could see you now?"

Momentary confusion throws her anger temporarily off track. "Who?"

"Never mind. Point is, Trepe, you give it up to Garden every day for nothing more than a pat on the fucking head and a 'good dog'. You're worse than a whore- at least the high-priced ones are smart enough to charge a shit fucking ton of money. How much is that instructor's salary? Worth giving up everything that ever meant anything to you? Like, I don't know, fucking morals?"

"_You're _one to talk about morals!" she hisses, one hand balling up into a fist on her thigh, and even she is not quite certain if she is going to hit him again.

He spits again, wipes his mouth again, goes back to glaring at her. "At least I wouldn't let you take one through the head just because Garden fucking said to-"

From the other side of that wire-link fence separating them from the other two squads, something explodes hard enough to send earthquake ripples of shockwave through the ground underneath their own feet; there is just enough chivalry in Seifer Almasy to hunch his body over in front of her, and this abrupt shift of his balance shoves him forward against her hard enough to disrupt her equilibrium as well. She catches a fist full of his coat collar in both hands, and now understanding roars through her and hollows out her stomach and hammers from her brain every protocol and procedure and order Garden has ever driven home-

The back of his trench coat splashes wetly beneath the hand she stretches tentatively down to touch it, and she pulls it away shaking and dripping and red.

"Seifer." A little rattle of a shake jostles his head back and forth on his shoulders, but elicits no further response. "_Seifer_!"

She hits him with a dose of Cura hard enough to seize him up in her arms, and cradles him against her chest like a child until he stops shaking.

"What the fuck was that?" he snaps, and now the magic-fueled adrenaline in his system stands him up fast enough that she does not even try to stop this separation of his body and her arms, and just half a flicker of her sand-caked lashes is long enough for Hyperion to make its way to his hand.

"Seifer, do not engage until we have assessed-"

He is already gone, his red-smeared back disappearing around the fence and into the main outer area of the facility.

She does not have time to order him back, and it is a waste of her breath anyway; a short sprint puts her into the thick of something she is not prepared to see, and training-instilled wariness pulls her up short, except she does not have time to pause and attempt to understand how the balance has shifted so far out of their favor-

He is about to be decapitated.

Her forward leap is a nicely-executed flying side kick just this side shy of perfect, and it blows through the knee of the man aiming his blade for the back of Seifer's neck and crumples him like a cheap table giving out, and half a spin unfurls Save the Queen and wraps it around the throat of one of the half a dozen black-garbed shapes surrounding Seifer: a sharp yank seats the barbs and folds his neck over the wrong way, and she unwinds the coil with a deft flip of her wrist as he stumbles forward spraying blood.

There are bodies in Garden uniforms all over the ground underneath them, but she does not have time to process this.

She can see him slowing as her hasty spell begins to dissolve from his central nervous system, bringing howling back all the pain his shredded back must be shooting throughout his entire body, and a skillful toss of his gunblade that transfers the weapon to his off hand answers her question: he is wearing out far too quickly.

Shiva is an arctic claw-scrape in her mind, and she lets loose and flares wide her palms and lets both eyes go half-lidded-

And pain like second-degree burn blisters all her veins and shrivels up the malfunctioning sacs of her lungs and forces open her _heart_, and she just barely feels the hand that flashes out to cup her elbow, keeping her upright: the screams that grate themselves across her ears like chalkboard squeals of nails going on and on and on hurt almost as much, but she does not have time to succumb to any of this, the acid in her veins or the shards of ice that spray out like shrapnel-

"_Run_," she hisses, and it is the first time in her entire career she can ever recall him listening to her.

They make for the bunker just beyond the fence, and a linebacker thrust of his well-muscled shoulder squeals open the door and spills them both gasping inside; an afterthought of a mule kick closes it behind them hard enough to trigger the locking mechanism.

He drops Hyperion and goes for the lit-up panel in front of them, hitting everything at random until something inside the main facility goes off with a shriek that sends both hands up over her ears.

It is supposed to be a stealth mission, no alarms, no attention drawn; there will be inquiries now, news crews, concerned citizens that will question the security of this facility harboring enough firepower to decimate entire cities-

He slumps forward over the panel vomiting.

She has to put all the strength years and years of bodyweight training have given her into levering him off the panel; he is even heavier than he looks, all slumped over like this.

They slide down onto the floor together, and a bodyweight blow hard enough to shiver vibrations throughout the entire door jars a shrill warning beep from the locking mechanism.

She pulls open his coat and slides it down over his arms as quickly as she can, with him half-conscious in her lap. "Where are you hit?"

"The door-"

"Seifer, where are you _hit_?"

"My whole goddamned body, I think."

Something gives a muffled thud from the other side of the door and sudden noise and light and splitting tearing _ringing _inside her head presses her face instinctively down into his hair, and a moist cough that shakes his whole body underneath her sprays wet heat against her cheek.

There is a smoking crater of a fist-sized hole in the door when she lifts her head.

He hacks another cough into the hand he curls up into a fist around his lips. "What's the protocol for this? Is it time for you to let them shoot me yet?"

"Shut _up_," she snaps, shifting his weight off to one side so that she can slide out from underneath him, whip in hand. "Just let me think for a moment."

He stops her with a hand that is still surprisingly strong, pulling her back down next to him as she gathers up her legs underneath her. "Are you fucking retarded? What are you going to do with that?"

"They can only enter a couple at a time; we have the advantage, as long as they have to come at us separately. Reinforcements will be here soon. All we have to do is hold them off-"

His derisive snort brings her up short, and she yanks her arm from his fingers. "Are you fucking kidding me? Their response time is shit. Remember that little class trip we took out here a couple of months back, to view 'real security procedures'? It's like the army gathers up all their window-licking idiots and sticks 'em all out here. President Deling is a fucking moron, not keeping this place better maintained. It's only the sole fucking missile base anywhere on this continent. Intercontinental missiles with enough firepower to level Deling City- who the fuck needs to keep an eye on those, right? But yeah, Trepe, I'm pretty sure we're going to die."

"I refuse to let your voice be the last thing I hear," she says coldly, trying to rise again.

Another one-handed pull on her arm puts her right back down where she was, and a frustrated toss of her dominant hand sends Save the Queen airborne; a sideways flick spins the barbs out of reach of any bare skin in range, and now his hand comes down on her wrist hard enough to hurt.

"I didn't mean what I said. About you being a whore," he says casually, as though he can just slip his apology in through the cracks without her noticing, and she looks up with a frown into his dust-smeared face half an inch away, layered in grime and blood and little wet-gleaming flecks of white she does not want to think about.

He is smiling.

She cannot figure out what kind of a smile it is- lightly mocking or resignedly regretful or one last hint of sincerity from this boy who is never sincere, but a little back of the mind flicker is thinking about the dimple hidden underneath layers and layers of battle filth, and how she is never going to see it again, and oddly enough-

She thinks she is going to miss it.

There is another shudder from the door.

"I think," she says slowly, coiling up Save the Queen as his grip on her wrist slowly slackens and peels away and slides back down onto the thigh of his blood-soaked pants, "you're right."

"Praise fucking _Hyne_- when's the last time you said _that_?"

"I believe this is the first time."

"And you think I'm right about you not being a whore? You're not sure? Well, fuck, Trepe, if that's the case, and I'm about to die-"

"I think you're right that we're not going to _make it through this_," she snaps.

He smiles again, and it is no challenge to figure out what kind it is this time: she has seen this smirk enough from the back if her classroom to know precisely what it means.

It is all show, though, she realizes a moment later, because when she stands he does not stop her this time, and the flicker of glance she slides toward the shuddering door frame is all the time it takes him to gather his feet up underneath him and rise with her, his warm blood-slick side pressed against hers.

The pulse on her hand is a three second squeeze that strikes her as oddly shy, and in the half second it takes her eyes to flick from the door up to his face, she feels his gloved fingers slide off her palm and trickle down through her own, and for just one infinitesimal moment everything goes stark and still and etched white along the corners: flash-frozen memory, all seared into the corners of her mind that will hang on as long as they can.

She does not want to die. She has a career and a future and a _life _she is not yet ready to let go, and this cannot simply be _it_, this stone-carved shack that smells of blood and vomit and sweat, and her lips flap loose and slide open and start to tell this boy who has never been anything more than a perpetual thorn in her side that she is sorry, she is a failure and she is _sorry_-

And the door blows inward and in this white-etched moment going hazy along the edges she sees his arm swing up to shield her face and his body drop into the instinctive hip-back stance that for him is as casually natural as breathing, and now this infinitesimal flash-frozen moment shatters like Shiva unraveling all around her-

-and the last thing she remembers is that he does not let go of her fingers until he absolutely must.

* * *

><p>Present<p>

Balamb

"Quisty?"

His voice pulled her from past into present, and she made the shift as reluctantly as Seifer shaking off fatigue in the morning, one knuckle in his eye and a scowl on his face.

His shoulders carved shape into the blankly infinite blood-glow of the sky above her head, and a ponderous blink resolved his features into familiar angles and slopes of pale ink-etched skin.

He squatted down in front of her, the rainbow spray in his hands getting crushed under the knee he set carelessly down on top of them, and a wet throat clear found his voice, all sandpaper edges. "I brought you something."

She could feel her smile stretch as tightly as plastic, an artificial offering that did not fool him even a little. "Thank you, Zell. They're beautiful."

He rescued the bouquet from beneath his knee and handed them up the steps to her, balancing in his squat with both hands on his thighs and a frown on his lips. "You just looked sad sitting here, you know?"

Freeloader's tail thumped heavily on the steps underneath them. She swiped an absentminded pat across his head that did not at all impress the dog, and with a sourly disappointed look he staggered up onto his feet and trotted down the steps to set off toward home, tongue lolling.

Zell swiveled around at the waist to watch him go, one corner of his mouth pulling up just slightly. "He misses the asshole too. You know all Seifer can ever talk about is how much he hates that dog? And then he sits out in his yard for like an hour playing with him, and if Irvine and I aren't home and he is the thing pretty much lives with him. But ask him about it, and he'll say any day now he's gonna' chop the thing's head off and make it into steaks, you know?"

The slight smile this brought to her face hurt all the way down deep in her chest, and she balled up a fist like that insignificant little fold of scar-serrated flesh could hold everything inside her, all the little jigsaw pieces of his smile and his eyes and his outstretched hand flared out underneath her nose, helping her up for a price-

_-not to be a pig instructor but if I'm gonna put you back on your feet when you're this pissed at me I better get something good out of it-_

"He's good at pretending he doesn't care."

A one-shouldered flinch of a shrug, half an inch of movement: his only answer, because the only thing that would not crack his voice or mist his eyes right now was frowning silently down at his hands, spread out flat across his knees.

"I've lost him," she said quietly, looking down at her handful of flowers. "There's no…he can't be expected to survive…to survive _that _again. It would be cruel, for me to want-"

"He's always gonna' come back to you, Quisty, as long as you're here for him." His interruption was a too-loud bleat in her ear, all choked-up. "He didn't have anyone to come back to, last time. He was…he was really lonely, even with the Posse, even if he'll never say anything, but you know, Irvine can get anyone to talk, and Seifer said some stuff…I think he was really hurt, that we all just forgot about him, like he passes it off as all pride because he's too important for anyone to forget him, but really, I think he just wanted a family and he felt like no one wanted him. And now someone does, you know? He's not just gonna' give up on that."

"I don't want him to come back, if there's nothing left of him by the time she's done," she said quietly, and an involuntary spasm of her fingers crushed the stems in her hands to summer-scented pulp. "He shouldn't have to do that, for anyone."

A flip of his joined fingertips turned his palms inside out with a pop like firecrackers going off, and now he bounced up out of his crouch to seat himself beside her on the steps, hands in his pockets. "I want him to come back. I think he can make it through, and save Ellone, and come home to you and get married and quit Garden and go off to do whatever he wants. I believe in him, you know? So you should too. It's hard sometimes," a brief falter in his tone jumped his voice an octave, "believing Ellone's going to be ok and that we're going to get to be happy together one day, but then I think about how Seifer's with her, and he won't let anything hurt her, and how he went with Rinoa just to save Ellone, even though he could have stayed behind and been with you and just said fuck it all. If I wanted anyone with her, keeping her safe, it would be him." A transitory sketch of a smile, just barely hinted at, showed itself like a ghost along the edges of his lips. "'Cause he'll break everything that's in his way to get back to you, you know? An army, a sorceress, whatever, it doesn't even matter to him. He's always gonna' get his way no matter what he has to do, you know?"

A little spectral curve, just as fleeting, made an appearance across her own mouth. "When he was my student, and I was constantly assigning him detention for one transgression or another, he used to bribe the younger cadets to trade places with him, in exchange for turning a blind eye to their time in the secret area, or running in the halls, or visiting…unauthorized sites on the computers in the library. Once I left the room for just a few moments to talk to another instructor, and when I came back he was all slumped over on his desk, with the collar of his coat pulled up over his face, as though he were asleep. I decided a little peace and quiet would be nice for once and didn't bother to wake him for a while- only to find out, when I finally did, that it was some third-year in his clothing. I'd usually find him in the gym or the training center, absolutely unrepentant. He'd usually make a comment about the two of us 'sparring' together, and I'd fight with him for half an hour about returning peacefully to detention, if he knew what was good for him, until finally I had to take him by an ear and drag him through the halls, which always wounded his pride of course; he nearly pulled his own ear off a couple of times, yanking away. I think the loss of his ear would have bothered him far less than being manhandled by some girl."

"He used to write some really nasty stuff about you on the stalls in the guys' bathroom. And then this one time, some little jerkoff was talking shit about you because he was all pissed you failed him on some quiz, so he was gonna' have to redo the semester, and Seifer came out of the showers and overheard him, and broke his nose. It was like, he could say whatever he wanted, but if anyone else dared say something half as bad, he beat the shit outta' 'em."

She flicked her eyes up to the fading dull-rose glare of sunset, laying her flowers carefully across her thighs. "He was like that as a child, too. He constantly picked on all of us, called us names, buried Squall in the sand, pushed you in the ocean, but he was completely unforgiving of anything he thought might hurt us. Do you remember the Grat that attacked Selphie? He tried to fight it off all by himself, with just that little piece of wood he used to tape up and pretend was a knight's sword."

A smile at the very corner of his mouth wrinkled his tattoo into a little crepe paper crinkle; it made him look younger, less tired, the seventeen-year-old boy she had watched hold out his hand in vain to Squall with a little disconsolate sag of his shoulders and not this twenty-one-year-old man beside her, old before his time.

They were all old before their time.

She looked up into the sky and watched streaks of seagulls chase cotton bud puffs of vanishing clouds. "I wish I could have your confidence. How do you keep believing, sometimes?"

Another one-shouldered shrug tipped the creased sleeve of his shirt up toward his ear. "You just do, Quisty. Squall's doing everything he can to find them. And they're not alone, you know? It coulda' been a lot worse. And Seifer…Seifer's gonna' be ok. You'll see. 'Cause the thing is, I don't think of it like you said earlier- like he's gone through it once and there's no way he can go through it again. I think he made it through once, and it means he can make it through again, and he's _gonna' _because he's got friends who miss him and this whole life to come back to now, you know? What did he have before? A whole Garden full of people who hated him and thought he shoulda' been executed with Matron? No friends, no SeeD status, no family, he was like, bottom of the pile, you know? And he just said fuck you all, and he clawed his way back up to the top, and he made _you _like him- I mean, that's kinda' an accomplishment right there, right?"

A little quiver that might have been a laugh rippled out through her shoulders and down her arms. "Yes. I'd say that's convincing proof of his ability to perform miracles."

He patted her clumsily on the shoulder and reached down for the hand she kept folded carefully over the stems of her flowers, slipping his fingers inside hers. "So don't sit here alone anymore, ok, Quisty? Come over and talk to me and Kinneas if you need to; we're both here for you, you know?"

The streaks of seagulls in the sky overhead hazed over into indistinct painter's v's of black, little wet-drying brushstrokes layered into gradations of red. She watched until she could not see them anymore, silently holding his hand and his flowers in her lap, and when she could at last bring her voice back from the edge, all raw and wet and chewed-up around the corners, she could only croak an almost inaudible 'thank you' that winched his fingers down tighter over hers.

* * *

><p>General Caraway's Mansion<p>

Deling City

"Seifer."

His pacing carried him twenty measured steps toward the desk in the corner, Hyperion over one shoulder and his trench coat flapping at his heels.

"Seifer."

He could smell the goddamned hallway from _here_, clogging up his nostrils like the fucking slaughterhouse she had made his home into, an old-meat stench that clotted like vomit in the back of his throat.

The window in front of him took a full rotation of a swing with all his bodyweight behind it, and the dull stone-thud chime of his gunblade bouncing off threw him into another rotation that spun him like a windmill with the force of his blow, chipping another piece of oil-gleaming wood from the corner of the desk.

"_Fuck_."

"Seifer, just _stop_. It's not doing any good."

He turned on her like a fucking dog coming uncoiled out of a crouch, going for the throat. "I don't even know if she's still _alive_. I just fucking left her there-"

"Seifer, she'll be ok. You didn't leave her. Quistis is-"

He didn't want her to fucking _soothe _him. "Dead, maybe," he snapped, pinching the bridge of his nose with his free hand and taking three steadying breaths that smoothed the cracks in his voice and the tremor in his hands. "There's a way out of here. There's a secret passage, or something- Quistis said they took it down through the sewers during the assassination attempt on Matron."

"You already found it, remember?" she reminded him gently. "It's sealed up."

"Well maybe there's another fucking one!" He couldn't just fucking stand here with his thumb up his ass doing _nothing_, not with his guts all coiled up in his throat and his heart wadded up in his stomach, like a goddamned rock he'd swallowed and couldn't pass-

All he could see, every time he closed his eyes, was her red-streaming face, cradled in Squall's hands but turned beseechingly toward him, and this bitch, this fucking _cunt _wearing Rinoa's skin, she was fucking _keeping him away_, and he couldn't-

He couldn't just rot away here, wondering and worrying and dreaming-

The door to the study gave a creak that snapped his head around.

Ellone shrink-wrapped herself to his side; he stepped just slightly around and in front of her, putting himself between her shivering hunched-over body and whatever the hell was coming for them this time.

They never knew; Rinoa or the thing donning her like this season's fashion, to be discarded as soon as it passed out of style- it was anyone's guess what might walk through that door.

She brought the whiff of decaying meat and shit and vomit with her, and the crook of his elbow pasted up against his mouth just barely stopped the cough he pressed back down inside of him, eyes watering.

A faint twitch of his arm brought Hyperion to a subtle at ready that slanted the blade up and across the space between them and Rinoa, and a single convulsive pulse of a squeeze on his arm pulled his eyes around to peripheral, far enough to see Ellone's face.

She shook her head just slightly and slid her fingers down his forearm to tilt his weapon non-threateningly down toward the floor.

"I'm sorry Seifer, but they want me to do it. They said we have to…we have to make sure you're loyal. They want Ellone to watch…I don't want to hurt you, but I have to, if we're gonna' be safe."

From that peripheral little corner, all blurry around the edges, he watched all the color bleach itself out of Ellone's cheeks.

"Rinoa, you don't have to do this- he said he would follow you anywhere, and he meant it- you're not alone anymore, we're both here for you, so you don't have to-"

"He _says _that, but he keeps talking about someone named Quistis- I can hear him going on and on and _on _about her; it's like nothing else matters to him and it hurts my feelings!"

Ellone reached up to wrap one hand securely around his right elbow, like these pale stripes of bone-bleached fingers that pressed down like manacles across his sleeve were going to help him for even a fucking second. "You said you didn't want to hurt anyone- you said you _weren't _going to-"

"I _don't _want to, Ellone- they want me to, and I don't _want _to, but I just have to make sure you guys aren't ever going to leave me again, ok?"

Seifer twitched Ellone's hand off his arm with a casual little flick that loosened her grip and brought his palm around to slap up against Hyperion's handle with a muffled meat-thud of impact that was as casual as he could make it. "What are you fucking waiting for? Like I could stop you if I wanted to. You want my permission to mind rape me?" He bared his teeth grimly, peeling his lips back hard enough to hurt his whole fucking face. "Give me your best."

"Seifer, don't-"

He watched Rinoa's face crease up around the eyes and go white-pinched along the lips, and then something came howling in and shrieking back out again, and for some incalculable amount of time, this went on and on and on.

* * *

><p><em>your watercolor dreams<em>

_are red nightmare again-_

She is pulling and pulling and _pulling _and he's got nothing fucking _left _bitch let go _let go let go let go let go_-

* * *

><p><em>around and around you go-<em>

* * *

><p>The whole goddamned study is a blank formless blur he cannot paint shapes back into with a long slow squeeze of a blink-<p>

* * *

><p><em>crepe-paper rumples of age folds and reptile giggles in the dark-<em>

_ -are you a man or a boy-_

_ her face is all dry leather-rippled puckers beneath your fingertips and between the pads smear white-powder pieces of your mother flaking off onto your hands-_

* * *

><p>His forward slump against marble-polished desk corner is a stumble he cannot stop, and into his stomach jabs hand-filed edges that drive all the breath from his lungs in one white-nuclear explosion that feels like drowning-<p>

* * *

><p><em> -burn the children burn the children burn the -<em>

* * *

><p>"Rinoa, <em>stop<em>, please-leave him alone. _Leave him alone_!"

* * *

><p><em>the end of the world<em>

_ is a neutral smoke-gray_

_ wasteland-_

* * *

><p>He feels ridges of warped wood beneath carpet, pressing into the base of his spine.<p>

_-don't cry little boy in here no one is real time is fluid don't you see you can go anywhere you want you can _do _anything you want isn't that what you wanted all along boy in here it doesn't matter that they don't love you_-

* * *

><p>Spinning is something he cannot come down from: he is all churned up like the waves painting broad flat strokes of gold into white-blonde sand, slapping shape back into flat-packed pathways.<p>

He is holding on so _hard_, just for her, but it hurts, it fucking _hurts_, and would she really want him to just _stay _here, in this eternal white noise that is a thousand little splinters of those drills, all chewing him up at once-

He's not going to give in, cross his heart and all that shit.

He's just going to die, do what he should have done in the first place, before his mother smashed him into little uneven fragments of himself because he can't _do _this again, not without losing his fucking mind-

"Seifer. Seifer, can you hear me? Seifer, _please_-"

Pain hisses sandpaper scrapes across his lungs and above his head the pale red-splattered blotch he thinks is the ceiling wavers even more-

"Seifer- Rinoa _stop_. Stop, you're _hurting _him-"

In, out, the chest goes up, down: these are the only thoughts he can think, sprawled across these ridges of warped wood beneath carpet.

Someone, somewhere, once said 'Live free or die', like those were the only two options, like anything else was a waste of goddamned time not even to be dignified with the merest fucking consideration.

Freedom or death. All or nothing.

Thing is, maybe there's something to be said for finding one in the other: maybe death is a kind of shaking off the shackles all on its own, and maybe it's not the best option, but he thinks it's the only one left to him, because he's not going back to her as that carved-hollow skeleton man with the dead star of a heart, all burned out and used up and layered in poison.

The fingers inside his mind jerk back and break loose and he plunges from nuclear hell into Trabian stormfront, and between these two extremes he just keeps swinging, back and forth and back and forth-

* * *

><p><em>-his black-flaking lips peel back from his face and wither up in his palms and the sheer potency of her spell is so unfathomable he does not even understand what he is looking at until the mirror she tips toward him shows him two smears of ash for eyes and white seeds of teeth poking through feathered layers of cinders-<em>

_ -seifer shh shh shh mommy's here don't be scared ok look look again I made it all go away mommy wouldn't just leave you like that seifer don't you understand I wouldn't do that to you I love you very much-_

* * *

><p>"Seifer, it's Ellone. It's Ellone, Seifer, can you hear me? I need you here with me, Seifer, ok? You can't leave me- I'm so, <em>so <em>sorry but I'm scared and I don't want to be alone and you have to _wake up_, please-"

He is _done _with waking up, get it? He's been doing it every day for fucking _years _now, _fucking years _of shaking it all off and sealing it away and going on like he is still whole and his mother loves him and he will one day have something to look forward to that's not bare-dirt mound on a battlefield somewhere-

"Quistis is waiting for you to come back. She's _counting _on you, Seifer _please_-"

In this numb wood-block in-between state, one foot in the grave and the other pointing the same direction, he is still alive enough to try and swallow around the lump in his throat, and find that he can't.

Shit.

Fuck _shit goddamn_-

* * *

><p>The sky is an abstract painting: sewn-together clouds painted Day-Glo and lavender, all the colors of Matron's garden splashed together like sloppy swirls of childhood artwork, pinned proudly to the dented face of the fridge.<p>

No-

Not the sky. He can't see the sky, where he is right now.

Slow sunspots of blurred light resolving into patches of almost-coherent sight: that is what's happening to him right now.

He sees the cream-painted slope of the ceiling over his head and the tears on her cheeks and the blade in his hand, pressing its cold-steel handle into the knob of his hip: an instinctive clench of his hand kept it from flying loose and shoving an arms span of polished blade up his own ass or someone else's, and looking down at it now, something inside him knots up and sinks down and settles into a lead anchor-weight inside his gut.

When this is all over, this handle in his hand and this blade pulled up tight against his leg will be the only things left to him.

She's put the first dent in his armor, after all; the next blow will widen the crack a little more, and a little more after that, on and on and on until he is all fissure and no resistance.

Ellone's face eclipses the red-edged smudges of his vision piecing itself slowly back together, and her smile is like the sun coming out in that Day-Glo sky, and this is so fucking familiar to him that he is thrown all the way back to a beach and a sandcastle and a skinned-up knee, courtesy of pissed-off little Quisty Trepe's foot, barking the shit out of it all the way down to his shin.

_-and here is Sis standing over him now as he tries not to cry, a smile on her face and the sun a frayed halo behind her shoulders-_

This smile is all soft and smeared into haze around the corners, and he blinks twice -fucking _eyes_- and slides one hand up to intercept the fingers stumbling up from his shoulder to reach toward his cheek-

She stops just shy of his face and instead uses her hand to wipe her eyes, looking away. "Why did you provoke her like that, Seifer? Maybe it wouldn't…maybe it wouldn't have been as bad, if you hadn't said anything-" There is a clog in her voice that will not let her finish the thought.

Why?

Because Chicken Wuss Zell Dincht is his friend and his brother and he loves this woman with the pale velveteen hands that do not belong in this soldier's world she has become all tangled up inside, and trying to stand up for him kept pulling that bitch's attention off of him and spotlighting it on her.

Because maybe if he keeps Rinoa puzzling over whether or not his loyalty is all flash and no substance, she will stop fucking with this woman that deserves to go home to a husband and a front porch and a lawn in the suburbs.

It's way too much fucking optimism and not enough pragmatism, but it's all he's got right now.

He does not say any of this. He lays his head back against the subtle flaw in the floor and let's the drummer inside his skull try to pound its way out through his eye sockets, and he lets her tenderly comb hair our of his eyes and sit with her hand over his, but most of all, he pretends it is someone else's hand on his forehead and cupped over his fingers, and he lets himself drift until those sewn-together clouds are the only backdrop he can even see anymore.

There is a woman on a rain-rotten porch, calling him inside.

His mind is a soft focus filter he fine-tunes until everything is just right: the porch is not rain-rotten, but enthusiastically slapped in layers of paint that will have to be corrected, hours later when the multi-colored painters have been sent off to bed. On the sills beneath sagging window frames bloom rainbow sprays of flowers he helped his mother nurture when no one was looking, and standing in water up to her ankles is a little girl in a yellow sundress, getting wooed by a boy who is all angles and elbows.

He holds onto these images as he trickles in and out of unconsciousness, and the hands on his forehead and his fingers do not disappear, until he is ready to come back.


	23. Interlude Eleven

**A/N: Just this brief update for right now, because I'm on my lunch break and don't have time to go through a full chapter at the moment. I will, however, be posting chapter twelve later tonight.**

_Dear Selphie,_

_I try to keep hoping, cuz I know it's the rite thing to do and it's the only thing I realy can do, you know?_

_But it's realy hard sometimes. And I wish you were hear to help me, cuz it's like nothing could get you down Selph no matter what hapened, you_ _always looked on the brite side and figured it was all gonna turn out ok._

_I told Quisty I beleived in everything turning out ok but I lied._

_I hated lieing to her Selphie. I just didn't no what else to do. _

_Wen I'm all alone in my room at nite and there's no distracshons to keep me from thinking about everything that's going on I think about Ellone and Seifer and Rinoa and how we're gonna lose them like we lost you and it's like we're all just disapearing, like everybody made it out ok the first time so carma's coming back to bite us in the ass, you no? _

_ And then I think about how I just wanna go home. I just wanna go home, Selph, not here at Garden, but to Ma's or even all the way back to the orfanage where we were all just a bunch of stupid kids, poking jellyfish with sticks. _

_ Maybe I'm a coward._

_ Maybe I'm just tired._

_ I don't no anymore, Selphie. _

_ I just wanted you to no, becuz I can't talk to anyone else becuz now that you're gone I'm saposed to be the one that keeps everyone happy, that thinks everything's gonna be ok and we're all gonna be together just like wen we were kids._

_ But I don't. _

_ And I new you'd understand. So thanks for lisening, Selphie. I miss you._

_Love,_

_Zell_


	24. Chapter Twelve

**A/N: Ta da; told you this chapter would be up later tonight. Enjoy the slight breather, because the next chapter is looong; I thought about breaking it up into two, but there were several events I wanted to occur all in the same chapter, so likely it will stay one monstrous update. I'm still debating to some degree. If I do break it up, the two parts will be posted together, so you guys won't be left hanging either way.**

**illi- It's nice to see a new face around here. Thank you so much for the review; the alert for it popped into my inbox yesterday, which was much more stressful than I wanted it to be, and your review gave me a nice little mood boost. I'm glad you are enjoying the story.**

**Tequila Princess- Me? Sadistic? I don't know where you'd get that idea. ;) I already know how everything is going to pan our for these characters, but you guys are just going to have to wait a while longer to fine out.**

**sulou- Nope, no one gets a break. I just ain't a fluff writer, but I'm not totally heartless either. (That's mostly true.) As for their ending...that'll come in time. Half the fun's in the guessing, or at least I think so. (And the worrying, and the nail-biting, if it's something I'm writing, anyway.)**

**Mishka- You know, interestingly enough, some of the smartest people I know are some of the dumbest when it comes to relationships. I really don't understand that, but common sense just seems to go out the window for a lot of people when they're dealing with emotions. Which I guess shouldn't be that big of a stunner- emotions are not subject to any sort of rhyme or reason, and they often make us act in completely irrational ways.**

**Aixyutin- I've always sort of viewed Rinoa as a ticking time bomb as well, especially since I just can't wrap my head around the possibility of sorceress possession NOT causing a shiton of problems. **

**DarkPrincess- I hate the things I do to Seifer sometimes. I seem to always give my favorite characters the shit end of the deal. I just can't help tormenting the poor guy, though. **

**Thanks for your comments guys; I really appreciate them, and hope you continue to enjoy the fic. **

**Chapter Twelve**

Presidential Palace

Esthar

He sat with his face in his hands and both elbows on his desk, listening to the clock on the wall and the trip hammer pulse of his heart in his chest.

The clock was what most stood out, in this sunless haze that was his clumsy reluctant stumbling through all the motions that kept him human: shades of charcoal, molded into a little box all around him, this was his world now, all fog and dream and that clock on the wall, tick tick ticking.

Somewhere out there was the little girl who had poked and prodded and patiently guided him toward the best thing that had ever happened to him, and he had lost her: he had lost Raine's precious little pig-tailed girl, _Ellone_, who smiled when he was too serious and steered him gently back on track when he was anything but-

His hands were all scarred up along the lifelines, remnants of his days as a soldier, before desk work softened and rounded off all the calluses. Little starry bristles of bone-white imperfections, gilded in noon-glow-

That was how they'd used to look to tiny bright-eyed Ellone Andrin crouching in the dirt beside him, digging for bugs in one of the neighbors' gardens. Only they had not been imperfections to her, but little map lines to trace and explore and exclaim over; he'd concocted elaborate stories of dragons and princesses and knights riding to the rescue just to watch her smile, and at night when she started asking Raine to let 'Uncle Laguna' help tuck her in, something inside of him had blistered and cracked open and peeled aside, and where his heart used to be was suddenly the raw new knowledge that he wanted this woman and this smiling little girl to be a part of his life, forever.

He had lost one. He could not stand to lose the other; he would _not _stand it, if he had to tear down the whole world to find her-

A knock on the door pulled his head up from his hands, and Kiros' face in the sliver of opening he chipped cautiously into the unlit gloom of the presidential office relaxed the strained tension of Laguna's shoulders, just slightly.

"Squall's on line three."

He sighed and rubbed a hand up over his face. "All right. I'll be with him in a sec."

Kiros' slit-eyed appraisal lasted only a moment, more than long enough for him to peer right through the flimsy little veil of normality Laguna pulled down over his features. "Need some coffee?"

An offhand flick of his wrist indicated the mug in front of him.

"I brought that to you two hours ago, old man." He pulled up a chair on the other side of the desk and sat down straddling it, looping both arms over the back. "You're gonna' kill yourself, sitting here in the dark worrying yourself sick over it," Kiros pointed out quietly, his brow creasing.

"How am I supposed to think about anything else? How can _you _think about anything else? We don't even know if she's still ali-"

"If you say what I think you're about to say, I will jump this desk and knock the shit out of you, I swear to Hyne." A little thick-voiced pressure on the threat told Laguna he meant business, and he looked down at the bled-dry knot he had gathered his fingers into, squeezing tighter. "Don't you ever talk like that. She's not alone, Laguna. She's not alone, and she's a smart girl; she'll know how to survive until we can find her and bring her home. Which we will do."

"Must be nice to be so sure of yourself." The bitterness in his voice wound his lips up tight along the corners, and he watched Kiros' forehead screw itself up the same way, his eyes beneath knit-together brows becoming little half-shut nicks in his face.

"I have to be. We can't both sit around being useless."

The slamming of the door punctuated this statement like a gunshot, and for the first time in the last several hours Laguna moved, an involuntary lurch forward that brought him half out of his chair, cursing.

"Broke my vase, asshole!" he yelled, frowning down at the shattered pieces of hand-painted ceramic winking up at him like fleeting glimpses of far-off stars, burning on in a moonless sky.

His sigh pushed him back down into his chair and one more long shaky breath poured feeling back into his dead-wood body, and out stretched one of the hands Ellone had exclaimed over so long ago.

"Squall. Good to hear from you…son."

* * *

><p>Winhill<p>

Galbadia

23 Years Ago

"Why?"

"Because Raine said you had to."

"But why?"

He tweaks the end of her nose just the way she likes and comes away with his thumb tucked between forefinger and middle, and her smile is just bright enough to outshine the sun spilling in through the window at his back. "Uncle Laguna, you already tried that on me, 'member? That's your thumb!"

"It is?" he gasps, mimicking wide-eyed astonishment good enough that she giggles and swings her feet where they hang down from the counter, even if she does not believe him.

"Yep!"

"All right, I give up." He throws his hands in the air and brings them down on both hips, smiling up at her from his bent-backed crouch, the only position he can find that will put him at eye level with her. "You're just too smart for me."

"I know!" she crows, and from the little sliver of peripheral vision that is a sunny dust-spotted crescent out of the corner of one eye, he watches Raine hide a smile in the rag she is using to wipe down the counter top.

"All right then, Little Miss Smarty Pants, it's time for bed."

"But _why_?"

"Because some Grats got in the door and they're attacking you and the only way to escape is up the stairs! Quick! I can't hold them off!" he yells, and now his fingers tease out all the ticklish little spots he has become well acquainted with, over these past several months: behind the left knee and up both sides, toward the armpits, up along the shoulders to the back of her neck, and finally around to the soft little pouch of a belly that is the last remnants of her baby fat, still holding on.

Her shrieks precede him all the way up the stairs he thunders up after her, and at the top his arms swing her through a breathless laughing circle that cushions her face against his chest; a one-shouldered nudge to the door of her room puts her within eyesight of the dreaded bed, and now she winds both arms around his neck with a sigh, pushing out her bottom lip. "Do I _have _to?"

"Yep, you do."

"Are you gonna' tell me a story?"

"I will if you put your pajamas on and get into bed right now." He gives her a fleeting brush of a kiss across the forehead, and sets her down to scurry madly toward the dresser in the corner.

The pale little stumps of her legs have never moved so quickly, in all the time he has spent with her these past months. Her acquiescence is a smug trumpet from beneath the covers, both shining eyes staring up at him in self-satisfied triumph: "I'm ready! I bet you couldn't even get ready that fast, right Uncle Laguna?"

"No way!" he agrees, taking a seat beside her on the bed and absently reaching to smooth out the creases he has created in the ripples and puckers Raine labored over so efficiently this morning. "Ok, little lady, what story do you want to hear tonight?"

"Is Raine coming to tuck me in?"

"Raine has one last customer she still has to take care of tonight, so it's just me." He pulls an exaggerated face that makes her giggle again, miming tears. "Are you trying to tell me I'm not enough?"

"Nope! It's ok! If Raine's not here, then we can talk confidantily."

He smiles down at her and tucks hair behind both ears, and looking down at this little girl with her bright eyes and her brighter smile, he feels something go loose and unanchored and nuclear inside of him, and now it is clogging up his throat, pushing his teasing all the way back down into his chest.

He will have to leave her one day. Charity is not forever, of course, and so someday soon he will set off up the road and leave behind this child and this bar and the woman downstairs with the soft robin's egg eyes that are slowly, day by day, healing all the lesions Julia left behind, but for now pretending will have to do, and so he squeezes this little girl's hand like he is never going to have to let it go, and there is just enough military discipline left in him to not let his smile waver when he turns it on her again. "You got a secret for me?"

"Not a secrit," Ellone corrects him, shaking her little head. "I wanna' know what are your intintions for Raine?"

The palm he presses to his lips like he is just casually resting it there for the moment barely stifles his laugh in time. "Who told you to say that?"

"Mrs. Bradley came and visited Raine today while you were gone, and she said 'Raine, are you just going to keep that man here without a ring on your finger? You don't got any family to look out for you and I worry about you all alone over here raisin this child without a man and I think it's time you found out what his intintions were. If I were tirty years younger, I'd swoop down on him so fast he wouldn't know what hit him'. Uncle Laguna, does that mean she's gonna' eat you, like when the birds out in the yard fly down real close to the ground and come back up with a worm?"

The palm cannot quite stop his laughter this time, but he smothers it quickly enough that her feelings are not hurt: there is no smile in the girl's eyes now, and the bumps that are her little fists all coiled up in the sheet she keeps tucked underneath her chin tighten fractionally.

"You know, I'm really impressed you memorized all that, Ellone." He ruffles her hair affectionately and leans back until he is pressed up against the headboard behind them both, leaning his cheek down on the top of her head. "Raine and I are friends, just like you and me."

She squints suspiciously up at him. "Not _just _like me."

There is too much shrewdness in her eyes for her own good.

"Are you two gonna' get married?" she presses on, blinking up at him.

Something inside of him wads itself up like a sweaty little fist in the pit of his stomach at this question, and a nervous throat clear pulls his voice back up from wherever it has chosen to vanish. "Ellone…I love you and Raine very much. I want you to understand that. But for Raine…I don't think it's like that for her."

"Like what?"

"You'll understand when you're older."

Her forehead bunches up into a scowl that ghosts a smile across his lips despite himself. "I _hate _when people tell me that! I'm _five_, you know."

"That's a little bit of a stretch- you've still got another couple of months to go, by my count."

"Well, Jin is already five and _he _gets to play in the front yard all by himself and he has a toy truck and if he's good his mommy lets him go next door and buy candy, so I want to be five. If you love Raine, how come you guys aren't married?"

He does not even startle at this sudden change in topic: he has been around long enough now to know that even a mid-sentence switch to something more intellectually stimulating so far as an attention-deficit four-year-old is concerned is not uncommon. "Well, honey, it's not that simple."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean just because people love each other doesn't mean they get married."

"Yes they do."

He leans down to tweak her nose again, smiling. "Oh? Man, you know a lot."

"The princesses always marry the prince because they're pretty and the prince loves them. Raine's pretty and you love her, right Uncle Laguna?"

He feels a soft smile perk up the corners of his lips: to be a four-year-old, and see the world in such starkly unchanging shades of black and white. Raine is more interested in running her bar and raising Ellone and keeping him out from underfoot than nurturing any small little spark that may have flared up between them these past several months (and in all honesty, that spark's more hopeless prayers on his part than anything tangible), and he knows there is nothing more than a little gratitude and a lot more exasperation there so far as he is concerned. (He can't help it if he drops most of the dishes she hands him to wash.)

"You're right, Ellone," he says softly, stroking a hand down the side of her head. "Raine's pretty and I…love her, but you know, just because we're not married doesn't mean you and I can't spend time together, right?"

"But if you're not married, then maybe one day you'll leave. That's what Raine said, that you're probly not gonna' stay here forever."

There is a catch in his chest that feels like his heart, stopping dead.

"She doesn't want you to leave either- she told me. She said she was used to having you around now, and it's kinda' nice. Are you gonna' leave if Raine doesn't love you the way princes and princesses do?"

The lie he slips out between his lips glides easier this time, because he is suddenly not positive it is a lie anymore: there is breathlessly wild hope in his heart and tension in his throat, and all he can keep doing is blinking and swallowing and _breathing_, little short gasps for air that compress his chest around that unbeating heart, and an involuntary jerk of his leg brings him all the way back to a piano and a smile and music that enfolds him like a dream, letting go softly.

Damn _leg_- one-handed pressure on the kneecap stops it momentarily, but there is that same nauseated swirl of sweaty-palmed anxiety inside him now, and it is all he can do to keep from vomiting all over the pretty pink-embroidered blanket she has snugged up across her chest.

Raine wants him to stay?

He just barely remembers to answer her: "I'm not gonna' leave you Ellone, not as long as you still want me around."

"I want you around forever, Uncle Laguna."

* * *

><p>"She asleep?"<p>

"Sound." He wipes one damp hand surreptitiously across the dusty outer seam of his pants, and pastes on a smile he hopes is convincingly genuine.

"How many stories did it take this time?"

"Oh, just one. We talked for a while before, so I think she was tired."

She looks up from the glass she is polishing with a frown, and slants a nod toward the right side of his body. "What's wrong with your leg?"

"Uh, oh, this? I get muscle spasm sometimes. It's leftover from an injury I got back when I first joined the army." He pokes his chest out just a little.

There is a gleam of wickedness in the smile she tucks behind the glass she raises up in front of her face, holding it in the thin beam of sunlight nudging its final fading strands through the window to the right. A speculative squint of her eyes shows her something just slightly off in the clarity of the sun-glow making its way through one of the facets; a swipe of her rag polishes away the smudge she missed. "A muscle spasm that happens only when you're trying to talk to a pretty girl? Jennia just left, so I don't know why you're still convulsing."

He can feel what must be absolute thunderstruck disbelief on his face, pinching up his lips and the corners of both eyes.

"Please, Laguna; it's an awful coincidence that that 'old injury' only flares up whenever you're attempting to hold a conversation with a woman. You couldn't keep your leg still for a month straight when you first got here."

"I can't help it that women happen to be its trigger; no respect for an old war veteran, huh, Raine?"

Her smile is so blindingly beautiful he takes it like a direct shot to the chest, reeling underneath it. "None whatsoever, 'Pops'." She sets the glass down on the countertop and the rag beside it, folding both arms across her chest. "I'm going to need you to stay in tomorrow and help, if you didn't already have anything else planned. There's going to be a festival in the town square- a sort of huge farmer's market, basically; well, as huge as anything Winhill's seen, at least- and I need all the help I can get, getting this place ready for tomorrow night. It'll be swarmed."

He seats himself carefully on one of the stools in front of her, mindful of his uncooperative leg, and leans both elbows down on the countertop. "Sure. I'll just run my patrols a little earlier tomorrow."

"Thank you."

She turns her back on him to begin re-arranging the wine bottles in their respective racks, and something sticks in his throat and clots up on his tongue, and now his leg cramp is a nervous drumbeat of a heel tap on the floor underneath his stool. "Raine-"

"So what did you and Ellone have to talk about for so long?" she asks at the same moment, cutting him off, and he crushes both hands together on the countertop before him like this jumbled knot of pale-knuckled fist clench will somehow conjure up all the courage he is going to need for this conversation. A cock of her head glances that long thin finger of sunlight off it just right, and now he can see brushstrokes of strawberry in amongst all that brown, pinned neatly back behind her headband. "I'm sorry," she apologizes, continuing to organize without glancing up at him. "You were saying something?"

One hand comes up through an arc that shakes more than he likes, and he digs all four fingers into the nape of his neck and clears his throat with a cough that is more than a little embarrassing: all squeak and phlegm rattle and changing pitch, like a teenager's voice making its first humiliating octave-length jump during an asthma attack. "Never mind. It's not important."

She turns back around just long enough to set a tumbler full of water down in front of him.

"Thanks. Got something caught in my throat."

What's caught is his nut sack all tangled up in his cowardice, but she doesn't need to know that. The sip he spends a long time swishing around inside his mouth clears some of the blockage and oils his throat just enough that she might be able to take him seriously, the next time he speaks. "Ellone wanted to know if I was leaving."

He keeps a hawk-eyed stare on her back, waiting for a reaction, and there it is in the subtle tension that suddenly bows both shoulders up toward her ears, and now something unknots itself inside his chest and unfurls out through all his veins, and it is all he can do to keep the euphoric smile on his face out of his voice.

"What did you tell her?" Raine asks carefully, without turning.

Another cough clears any trace of that smile from his next regretful words, and he leans back on his stool with a furrow in his brow and hope in his heart. "Raine, I appreciate everything you've done for me, and you know I love Ellone…but I can't stick around forever. I can't just keep imposing on you."

"It isn't imposing. You've been a great help to the town- the kids can play in their own front yards again, and the neighbors love you, which isn't something that can be said for many outsiders. And I've enjoyed running this bar by myself, but with so many regulars coming in lately, it's nice to have a little help-"

He keeps his voice as steady as he can make it, but inside his chest his heartbeat is a little fluttering jackhammer, chipping away at his tissue paper composure. "Does that mean you want me to stay?"

Her eyebrows are puckered angles of disapproval in her frowning face when she turns to face him at last, and a hand flattened along her left side picks an unraveling thread in that kitten-soft sweater rolled up to both elbows. "Laguna, you…you've been…we've enjoyed having you, Ellone and I. She adores you, and I would hate to take that away from her. I wish I could be enough for her, but she needs more than just me- she's lonely sometimes, or she was until you came, at least."

And that faint flicker of hope is suddenly snuffed out, as though she herself has pinched it to a silent premature death between those destructive fingers.

His fluttering jackhammer heartbeat is a cold pile of ashes now, clogging up his throat.

"I love Ellone," he says helplessly, because it is the truth and because it is the only one he can manage, in front of this woman with the robin's egg eyes and the kitten-soft sweater and the smile that has somehow wiped from his heart every last lingering dream of a singer and a piano and a life in Deling City with that woman in red, but of course he can't tell her this, of _course _he can't, because any affection she has mustered up for him is on behalf of Ellone, and what a damn _idiot_ he was, praying for something more-

"I know you do," she replies gently, taking her hand from her side to place it over the knot his fingers have not unfrozen themselves from, and a three second pulse on his knuckles is all the brief contact he needs to warm his entire body, his chest and its cold ash-pile of a heart all the way down to the tips of his toes in their burn-scarred boots, webbed in the old acid of monster blood that can never quite be scrubbed off. "She loves you too, Laguna. She'd be devastated if you left."

A frantic scrambling somewhere down deep bolsters his courage with the desperation that has been left in the wake of that burned-out hope, and he unwinds his hands and slips one out from underneath hers to reverse their positions, and now it is him holding her hand, and she who cannot quite meet his eyes.

"What about you, Raine? How would you feel if I left?"

"Well, I'd have a full set of dishes again." There is a lightness in her voice that does not reach her eyes, and a tightening in his chest makes it all the way down into the fingers he curves over the tops of hers. "And I'd certainly sleep better, without all that snoring."

"Raine, I-"

The smile on her face is as soft as the look in her eyes, and now that lightness flickers in her eyes after all, and he shuts up so fast his sudden silence is almost physical: the hard jolting click of his teeth coming together and the staccato thunder of that heel tap throbbing like a heartbeat beneath his stool; these are the only things that he is made of now in this moment that will vanish in another eye blink, and if he can just hold _onto _it, this look in her eyes and this smile on her face-

"Laguna, I'd like you to stay. And not…not just for Ellone."

"Really?"

"Yes," she says, and now there is just the faintest shadow of a dimple, pocking her left cheek.

When he leans across the counter it is an impulsive reaction he does not even understand until he is already halfway through the motion, and he can feel her surprise in the instinctive backward flinch that yanks her out of the arms he has draped across her shoulders without even realizing he is doing it. His own flinch is a cringe twice as violent, clattering his stool to the floor underneath him, and this shattering crash is followed a moment later by Ellone's voice at the top of the stairs, screaming something about monsters and nightmares.

"I'll go check on her," Raine says, rounding the countertop as he fumbles clumsily for the legs of the stool to upend it into its usual position.

"Right! Uh, I'll-I'll-"

"Laguna."

"Yeah?"

"You knocked the glass off," she tells him with a kind smile, indicating the tumbler on the floor and the dark halo around it.

"Jeez, Raine, I'm sorry, I-"

His pathetic stuttering is cut off abruptly as he pops back upright with the glass in his hand and a sheepish smile on his face, and now he has no words at all as something softly hesitant brushes his lips on his way back up and he finds himself suddenly in her embrace, all warmth and shy distance between their chests and her mouth on his-

Her _mouth _on _his_, and his stupid leg can vibrate right the crap off him, for all he cares-

"Raine," he whispers as she pulls away just enough to rest her forehead against his chest, and from the top of the stairs shrills Ellone's frightened wail like a siren, calling out for Laguna.

The crescents of her lashes cast little half-moons of shadow on her white-marble skin, and his heart is so out of control now it is less a fluttering jackhammer, and more an entire symphony playing its collective ass off right inside his chest.

She pulls away with a little secretive smile that is enough to set his damn pulse off all over again, and starts for the stairs.

He sets the glass reflexively down on the countertop, stunned into absolute silence.

Her pause is just a brief eyeblink of a moment he almost misses, still trying to process the graze of her lips and the fan of her breath and the soft folds of her curves, against all his hard-muscled angles.

The hand she extends out to him gives only the faintest ripple of a nervous shiver, and this subtle little hint that she is as scared as he warms his whole chest and now he reaches forward as she reaches back, and suddenly their fingers form a little knot in the space between them, his soldier-scarred palm to her soap-scented own.

Raine's smile is like a little starburst of an explosion inside him, and he cannot stop himself from returning it.

"Why don't we go check on her together?"

* * *

><p>General Caraway's Mansion<p>

Deling City

His footsteps are echoes in a cathedral, so loud they pound into his head like a thousand little fragments of heartbeat chipped off the main pulse.

He is all heartbeat now: the tidal-thunder of his blood in his ears and his heart in his chest, all flutter and kick and jackhammer thrust beneath his ribs.

He has been stuck here for _decades _with no action, and Rinoa's house is too goddamned big, and where the _hell _is Ellone when it is he who is supposed to be protecting her, not the other way around-

He can still smell corpses. He wonders if he will ever stop smelling them.

It is no wonder, with the hallways outside knee-deep in them: Fury Caraway's entire security team and all the staff required to run this monstrosity of a home, and even the man himself, done in by his own daughter's pretty little fucking hands.

He still dreams about arriving here with Rinoa on his arm like a queen, Ellone clutching the sleeve of his free arm and all those feet upon feet of manicured yard, unraveling beneath steps that are too fast, because each is a procession that brings him closer and closer to something he knows he cannot stop. He was right, of course: Daddy Caraway's neck sagged at an angle that poked up a red-smeared tongue through the skin at the base of his spine before the thought to leap between Rinoa's sweet little fucking face and her own father even crossed his mind, and now during these long nights when he cannot sleep for more than a few minutes at a time, he thinks about this latest failure in a whole fucking line-up of them.

The thought of those knee-deep layers of corpses rotting in the hallways outside this door is enough to shake even him, and for one long moment he stops in front of the window with Hyperion in his hand and a scowl on his face: he can see it reflected back at him in panes of glass smeared red-gold with sunset, and for this one long moment he can only stand there blinking, looking out onto the strip of yard that is beginning to go dried-stiff dead, without the gardener's loving ministrations.

The gardener is somewhere in that hallway, underneath Rinoa's nanny, probably.

If you've never seen a little fairy fucking princess of a thing work her way through an entire household of people who have loved and trusted and waited for her to come home, burning and breaking and tearing, then you can never understand what it is like to just stand there watching it like the impotent little fuck that you are. It is the one thing he knows will stick with him the longest, out of everything he has seen: years from now, when he is old and feeble and busy pissing his pants and forgetting his own name, he will remember an uppercut to his stomach that hunches him gagging around it, because watching her glide down these halls she grew up in with a smile on her face and blood on her hands is a physical fucking pain he is never quite going to shake loose.

There is a tap at the door and a fumbling at the knob, and he turns from the door with Hyperion over his shoulder but no tension in his body. Rinoa doesn't knock.

Ellone Andrin's face is a white-cheeked shell of its former self, all carved inward: loops of sinew that form ropes of cheekbone and pale-pinched slashes of lips, pressed together until one folds into the other.

Whatever she is doing to keep Rinoa away from him is killing her, which is goddamned funny, if you think about it: he threw away his whole fucking life to keep her safe and he has barely even seen her, these last few days.

"What the fuck are you doing?" he snaps, hefting his gunblade up from where it has slid into the angle between neck and shoulder. "Have you looked in a fucking mirror lately?"

"It's fine, Seifer." Her reply is barely a sigh that sags her down into the chair nearest her, some Hyne-awful pink fucking thing that marks this as a room Rinoa used to frequent. "You can't stop her anyway. If you try, she'll just kill you eventually. And she talks to me, sometimes, when she's not too busy talking to herself." Her eyes flick up to find his, and what shimmers beneath her long tear-spiked lashes folds him like a cheap table, and suddenly all his anger is gone: just like that she has suctioned him dry, and he turns away with a frown.

"Seifer."

"What?" There is still enough left-over anger burning somewhere inside of him to sharpen this answer, just slightly.

"She's planning something for Balamb. I don't know what."

"What?" The sharpness is gone, and now his voice is all raw and tight around the edges.

"She's…loyalty is very important to the sorceresses. That's why they try to keep their Knights so completely under their control. And she thinks…whatever is inside of her has made her think…that all of her friends, Squall…everyone…she thinks they all just threw her away because they didn't care about her. Sometimes she remembers who they are and why she was locked away for so long, but mostly she's just angry. She keeps…she keeps going on and on about how she doesn't want to hurt anyone, but they deserve it, and sometimes the only way for people to learn is for them to be hurt. She had to learn that for herself, she says."

His heart is a sick little ball inside his throat. He feels his fingers involuntarily winch down around Hyperion, and the look Ellone gives him tells him he is so pitifully fucking transparent he might as well just neuter himself right now. "She can't-" He flicks a hand through the air and brings it down to join the other on the handle of his weapon, because he can't think of anything else to do with it right now. "I won't fucking let her."

"She's taking us there tomorrow." There is no argument in Ellone's voice, only resignation, and his heart squeezes itself smaller. "You'll let her if she wants you to. There's nothing you can do."

"We have to kill her." He blurts this out so suddenly it is like it has just been building up inside of him, layer by layer by layer, waiting for this very moment to burst. "You have to help me figure out a way to do it."

"By tomorrow?"

"By whenever the fuck she wants to kill everyone we give a shit about!" he snaps. "She's throwing a fucking temper tantrum, just like that bitch used to do when I wouldn't listen to her, except when a sorceress throws a temper tantrum the whole fucking world burns. You want all our friends caught up in the middle of that? What the fuck about Zell? You think he wouldn't do everything he fucking could to-

"We _can't _kill her!" This is not so much a shout as something wrung out of her, leaving her slumped over with her face in both hands and her shoulders hunched up toward her ears. "She's not Ultimecia, Seifer. Ultimecia…Ultimecia was strong, but Rinoa…I don't even know what Rinoa is anymore. None of us know what Odine did to her. The things he does…did…in that lab…I can't…I don't even-"

Hyperion hitting the floor is repeated a hundred times around this vault of a fucking room: it is almost as numerous as the thousand tiny jackhammer prods of his heartbeat, flickering on and off and off and on again inside his chest.

His voice is as gentle as he can make it, through all the layers of hoarse tension that have knotted themselves around his throat. "She's never going to be Rinoa again." The crouch he eases himself into in front of her chair is a smoothly non-threatening coiling of his leg muscles, snapping all the tendons in his knees like gunshots pops of brittle old bones.

He is so very, very old before his time.

"I know that. It isn't that. I don't think we _can _kill her- you'd just die, trying to do it, Seifer."

Take it from someone who knows: everything and anyone can be killed, those he gives a shit about and plenty he doesn't: they're all going to be mounds in the dirt one day, and this thing wearing Rinoa's skin like it fucking belongs to the bitch is no exception. There's a seam somewhere, and all you have to do is prod and poke and peel and peel and peel, until everything just comes apart in your fucking hands.

This is what his mother did to him, and it is what he is going to figure out how to do to this woman who was once a part of his life and his bed and his heart, if he is being completely honest with himself.

* * *

><p>Orphanage<p>

Centra

"Your daddy's going to be here tomorrow; I know he can't wait to see you, even if constipation and excitement all kind of look the same on his face."

The bundle in his arms shifted with a gurgle and looked up with a smile, and something inside of him became a loose little puddle in his gut, leaking through to the rest of him.

He reached up to tip back a hat that was no longer there, and transferred Squall's son to his left thigh; a pink lump of a fist reached up to pull on his hair, still three inches too short.

He could feel the smile on his lips soften up his whole face, and the hand he reached out to the pale new fuzz of the little duck tail tuft that kicked up at the boy's neck shook just a little.

One day, he used to tell himself, another Irvine in another life would hold in his arms his own gurgling little bundle of a son, and hanging over one shoulder would be Selphie Kinneas with her cheeks still full of new-mother glow and her eyes bright with laughter, and together they would get old on a front porch with their grandchildren digging in the yard and jumping off the rails and shrieking out demands for grandma's cookies, until Seifer stomped over from across the street to paddle all their asses for disturbing 'alone time' between him and Quistis.

She would have been a good mother.

He still wanted to be a father, just a little, but now it settled like an old ache behind his ribs, a past injury that flared up in the cold: populating the world with little pony-tailed boys and sunnily-smiling girls was not the same dream without her there.

"Gloob," Adan declared firmly, bouncing a little on his lap.

Outside the window in the kitchen he could hear shrieks of laughter and raised cries for help, and the patiently lecturing tones of Cid Kramer putting them all gently in their place.

He used to get lectured in those same tones, once upon a time.

He stood up with Adan drooling down the front of his shirt and crossed to that window with his heart in his throat and a soft smile on his lips, and three rapid blinks wiped the heat from his eyes and the tension from his chest. "See that little white blob all the way across the beach there? That's your grandma. And the one next to it is your aunt. You would have liked them both; beautiful women. I'm gonna' teach you all about appreciatin' women like that." He jostled the infant just a little, leaning over to catch his eyes. "Can you say 'knockers', Adan?"

"Gloob!" Aden screamed, clapping both hands enthusiastically.

"We'll work on it, kid. Squall'll shit a brick. You'll enjoy making him do that- kinda' a thing all kids go through, you know, givin' their parents heart attacks. Think Matron probably had about three a day, with Seifer here."

The lump this put in his throat next to his heart squeezed his speech down to just a thin little whisper of a thing, bitter paste on his tongue. "Haven't seen 'Uncle Seifer' for a while, have you kid? Guess you're not old enough yet to care that much. The other kids…they keep asking me where he is. He hasn't been here for a while. He might…he might not get to come here again, you know. Dunno why I'm telling you this." A firm squint pushed more of that heat from his eyes and blurred the distant white blotch of Selphie's headstone against all that shining sun-warmed sand, and an inquisitive poke from Aden brought him back and pulled him down, and the smile he stuck onto his lips felt as odd as the thick paste of his voice on his tongue. "I froze up again, kiddo. Couldn't do it- she was a friend, you know? But I keep thinking that maybe if I hadn't, maybe if I'd taken a shot while she was distracted or something, maybe things would have turned out different- maybe Ellone and Seifer would both be here…and maybe I'm just babbling about nothing, huh? Maybe I'd have hit Ellone trying to get at Rinoa, or maybe Squall'd have stopped me…but I'll never know, because I did what I always do when it comes down to that moment, squeeze the trigger or don't, and I chose the one I usually do. I just hate killing, you know? You can spend most of a guy's formative years beating it into him, but it's never gonna' be instinct for some people." He gave his finger to Aden to squeeze and slide experimentally into his soft-gum mouth, watching the pale ghosts of the child and the man in the window do the same. "You wanna' hear a story, kid?"

An audibly-popped spit bubble was his only answer.

"All right, fine, I'm gonna' take that as a yes. This is a story your grandma used to tell me, and all your aunts and uncles when we were kids. We used to sit here in the kitchen while she made snacks and listen to her stories, or out in the living room with the fire going when it was cold, and Seifer would poke Zell until he got mad and kicked him, and then they'd get into a fight that would end with Zell crying and Seifer in time-out. Your Aunt Quisty would read to him while he was there and tell him everything he'd ever done wrong in his entire life, and how she'd _told _him not to, and he needed to listen to her more often. Sometimes it would take Matron three or four story sessions to actually finish a full story, with all of that going on. But she told this one a lot, and it was my favorite.

Once upon a time, the wife of this rich guy got sick, right Adan? So she called her little girl in to talk to her, and told her to be good and Hyne would look after her, and she would look down from heaven and take care of the little girl for the rest of her life. Then she closed her eyes and 'went to sleep for a long time', as Matron explained to us, since Dincht used to cry anytime someone died in a story. The man got married again to a woman with two daughters who were beautiful but a couple of little assholes. You'll learn all about that word and what it means when you're older, Adan. 'Specially if your Uncle Seifer decides to keep on gracing us with his presence." A quick hack of a throat clear was all he needed this time to clear that paste from his tongue and the heat from his eyes. "Anyway, the mean step-sisters took away all her pretty clothes and dressed her in ugly ol' rags and some clunky wooden shoes- Quisty and Selphie made a pair of those, actually, and made me wear them while they got to be the step-sisters so they could boss me around; things hurt like a bitch, 'cause some genius, and I ain't gonna' say who- Quisty- decided it was more 'historically accurate' to not sand them smooth- and they made her work all day and night like a servant. She had to get up before the sun was even up in the sky and carry water into the house, start the fire, cook, wash all their clothes, and none of that was good enough for them, so they did everything they could to make her life a living hell. They dumped peas and lentils into the fireplace so she had to sit there and pick them out, and at night when she was tired from working all day, they took away her bed so she had to sleep on the floor next to the fireplace. Little assholes, like I said. I always got the impression they were kinda' Seifer's heroes, because I caught him trying to drag Dincht's bed out of the room one day when we were kids- he thought he could hide it somewhere and Matron would just make him sleep on the floor instead of making one of us share with him. Anyway, the little girl was covered in soot and cinders from several nights of this crap, so they started calling her Cinderella.

So one day, the father decides to go into town to the fair, and he asks all the girls what they would like from it. One of the step-sisters asks for a beautiful dress, the other for jewelry. Cinderella asks her father to bring home the first twig that brushes up against his sleeve on the way home. So he brings home the dress and the jewelry and the twig, and Cinderella plants the twig on her mother's grave and sits down next to it and starts to cry so hard that her tears water the little twig, and soon it grows into this big beautiful tree. Three times a day, Cinderella would sit at her mother's grave and cry and pray, and every time she did this, a little white bird would do the same thing. Cinderella started to make wishes to it, and whatever she asked for the, little bird brought to her." He gave Adan a little poke in the soft pouch of a stomach beneath his paint-stained overalls, eliciting a smile. "You with me so far, little guy? Anyway, while all of this is going on, the king decides to hold this three-day festival and invites all the beautiful young women in the kingdom so that his son can choose a bride. The two step-sisters are invited, and demand Cinderella help them get ready. Cinderella does, but she's sad because she would have liked to go to the ball with them, so she asks her step-mother for permission. The old biddy refuses of course, pointing out that she's in rags and doesn't have anything to wear, and how can she possibly go dancing in what she's wearing- blah blah blah, right, little man? Guess she forgot it was her snotty little brats who put Cinderella in all that crap in the first place. So she keeps pleading, and finally the step mother tells her that she's poured a bowlful of lentils into the fireplace, and if Cinderella picks them all out, she can go to the ball. Cinderella-"

The gunshot crack of the front door slamming jerked Aden in his arms and the spectral outline of the man in the window, and an instinctive downward brush of his hand toward the weapon he'd left steps out of his reach on the table in the front hallway stopped short as a dirt-smeared little girl came barreling around the corner.

"Uncle Irvine! Cid wants to see you."

"All right, Maise, darlin'. Tell him I'll be right out."

"He says _now_ in his you're-in-trouble voice."

His frown crinkled up the corners of his eyes and painted furrows into the space between his brows, and in his arms Adan popped another spit bubble, smiling.

"Now now now now _now_!" she sing-songed, skipping out the door in front of him.

In Matron's pale withered square of a garden going brown around the edges, Cid kneeled with one hand to his chest and the other in the dirt beneath him, and Irvine's heart in his throat became a fist, squeezing shut around all his powers of speech.

It took him half an eyeblink to regain them. "Maise, hold Adan- careful, sweetheart; remember to hold him carefully, like this, ok?"

"Ok, Uncle Irvine!" she yelled cheerfully, accepting the infant with a bright gap-toothed smile.

"Cid?"

* * *

><p>His face is the same blood-drained corpse color of Selphie in her coffin, bleached to chalk beneath all her layers and layers of cosmetic, and for one moment the world spins out beneath Irvine's feet and upends itself over his head, because this is the only thing he can see now:<p>

Morning sunshine smile tucked behind ornamental red and clown's circles of pretend vitality in her cheeks and this is all wrong because he watched them unplug all those feet upon feet of coiled-up wires tethering her to this world and all his hopes and prayers and dreams, and this is not _Selphie _here in this silk-lined bed, this wax-doll replica of her with the blush-dusted cheeks and the lipsticked mouth- she likes grape-flavored lip balm and a little tinted moisturizer across the bridge of her nose and apples of her cheeks 'for evening out the skin tone' and don't they _know _this-

Cid's labored breathing is a point of curiosity for the children clustering around him, wondering if he chased Connor too hard, and Irvine scatters them with a few quiet words and a nudge here and there, and now underneath his knee is the cold grave dirt of Matron's garden, going to hell because Cid doesn't have a gardening bone in his body-

-the grave dirt is in his hand and not under his knee, getting tossed down onto a lid that has sealed her up and packaged her away and he doesn't know what the hell he is going to _do _without her- someone please tell him how he is supposed to go on when the little girl with the green eyes and the chocolate-flavored kiss is all folded up in a box in the ground-

"Cid?"

The hand in the dirt beneath his knee lifts slowly, like an injured bird taking flight, and a sturdy grasp on these fingers that used to put him to bed no matter how hard he begged to stay up all night pulls Cid to his feet with the children looking on from a distance, wide-eyed.

This man who raised him like a son and sold him like commerce pastes a smile to his lips that does not stick, and only an instinctive flash of Irvine's hand going for his elbow keeps him on his feet. "I'm all right. Just had a little dizziness. Probably got too much sun."

Dizziness does not paint death into cheeks that hang slack from too little food and too many years of sending children away to die. Men who make murderers of children do not swoon under a little noon heat, and this point leapfrogs the fist in his throat and makes it to his lips before he is even aware of the thought, and a deferential slant of his head that saved him more than a few times at Garden, when that Hyne-damned Lacey Marks made him laugh at Instructor Bryce, is the only thing that stops him now.

It is not quite a fair thought: there is no liar practiced enough to fake the love this man bestowed upon them all, but there is still this bitter little coil of left-over resentment twisted up deep inside him, because everyone he has ever loved and lost got tangled up in a life they didn't deserve, and it is all the doing of this man with the watery pouch-sagging eyes behind smudged glasses.

"You sure, sir?"

Cid straightens the bottom of his handprint-smeared vest like the fate of the world hinges on the angle of this one fraying old piece of cloth, and he repairs the adhesive of that pasted-on smile, and makes it hold this time. "Don't call me that. I haven't been 'sir' for a long time now. Just Cid, Irvine, please. Just Cid."

The children bunched up along the sidelines come rushing in from all sides, and he is jostled and elbowed and pushed right to the back beside Maise and Adan in her arms, watching silently.

* * *

><p>Balamb Garden<p>

Balamb

"When are you going to begin accepting new applications?" She tapped the papers in her hands into a tidy little pile using the corner of his desk, and nudged her glasses carefully back into place.

"I'm not," he said without looking up, penciling something in on a form in front of him.

Quistis looked up with a frown, setting the pile of papers in her hand down on his desk. "What do you mean?"

"I just got off the phone with Lagu…with uh…my father a little while ago. They haven't found anything on Rinoa." He tilted a look up at her from underneath his lashes, their edges gilded lampglow gold.

The fist of disappointment this winched down over her heart showed on her face: she could tell by the look on his own, and a discreet cough into the coil of palm she brought up to her lips gave her the moment she needed to compose herself, and now when she looked back up it was he who glanced away, his throat working.

"He's agreed to conscript full-fledged SeeDs into the Estharian army. I'm disbanding Garden."

Her astonishment was a ten second blink, half a dozen little flickers of lash that were not nearly enough to assemble his words into something vaguely coherent. "Excuse me?"

"As of right now, no new applications will be accepted. Junior cadets will be dismissed over the next few weeks, back to their families; they're too young to fight anyway. All full-fledged SeeDs have the choice to continue to work as mercenaries for Esthar when the war is over, or move on to new careers, but Garden is done."

Another blink cleared the smudge of yellow-ocher lamplight from the corner of her vision and resolved into clear crisp focus his unsmiling face, stiffly tight-lipped.

"Why?"

"Because," he said softly, looking out over the corner of desk she had tidied into a little smooth-swept workspace, "I want to stop the cycle. People send their kids to us thinking they'll learn a little discipline and take some pride in themselves, and we send them home in a box." He folded his hands into a knot on top of the paper in front of him. "When I was thirteen, I learned exactly where to cut someone's throat to bleed them out in just a couple of seconds. I don't want…I don't want Adan to end up like that some day, following in his father's footsteps…just…just carrying on all this…this _shit _Cid started before any of us knew what we were getting into."

The sudden vehemence of his outburst flinched her back just slightly, thumping her knee into the underside of the desk.

"I don't want…I don't want Adan to grow up without me," he went on quietly, and there was enough of his heart in his eyes to soften something down deep in her gut, and now suddenly she could feel tight wet warmth in her throat and heat in her eyes, and a gentle squeeze on his hand swung his head up and around toward hers, the frown on his brow slowly layer by layer peeling back from his scar.

His fingers stirred a brief pulse of a response underneath hers.

"He won't, Squall."

His smile was a deflated wisp of a thing, as exhausted as his eyes. "You're not…you're not mad at me for doing this?"

"Mad?"

"Garden is everything to you," he pointed out quietly, twisting his hands together into a knuckle pop that made her wince. Everything cracked so very frailly on them all, these days: old men and women, in young soldier's bodies. "I thought you might…" He trailed off with a frown, looking away from her fingers cupped over his to the lamp-shadow on the far wall, fringed black around the edges.

"Be angry?"

"Hate me."

"Squall," she said with a frown, a twitch of her elbow shifting the stack on the desk in front of her; a one-handed slap kept them all in place, and she spent a moment shuffling them all back into pristine order before she went on. "I understand why you feel the need to disband Garden. You're right. I think it's time…I think it's time no one else grew up the same way we did. It certainly hasn't done anything for us."

He turned his palm face-up underneath hers and his fingers found hers or hers found his, and now suddenly the only thing she could see was the pale knot of this union jumbled up on the desk between them, layered over the top of paper-coated wood, a thousand tiers thick.

His throat clear was an awkward pulse of adam's apple above too-tight collar, and a flick of his head tossed the clump of his bangs from his eyes, and now that hand coiled up around hers gave a little unraveling lurch that peeled it free from her own:

Moist skin on blue-painted practice mat- this was what the separation of his fingers from hers reminded her of, all trembling muscle fatigue and sweat-dripping palm, tearing free of vinyl in little suction cup pops.

She had sparred Seifer on top of one of those mats for the first time when she was fourteen, just a few weeks before her fifteenth birthday and her SeeD exam. She had known who he was already, of course- you didn't attend B. Garden without having at least some notion of the name 'Seifer Almasy' and what it meant and who it belonged to; at fifteen he was already six feet and one-hundred-seventy pounds of pure lean-muscled aggression, wielding his gun blade like a master after just three short years of instruction. He was the boy who took time out of his lunch period each day to torment her, throwing food and names and sneers like he did not even care she only raised her book higher, tilted her nose farther-

"Quistis?"

She blinked herself out of her reverie and back to the present, and his hazy blood-shot eyes shuffled five rapid little blinks of their own: one two three, half a second apiece, and she did not even have time to catalogue the fourth before a sudden crease puckered up the line of his scar and brought his chair squealing out from underneath him.

She watched both hands slip themselves inside his pockets, the thumb of his right hand nervously flicking the lining of his pants. "Are you all right?"

"I need to get out for a little while. I've been shut up in here too long. You want to go for a walk?"

* * *

><p>The smile she gifts him with is enough to get the blood pounding in his ears and thundering in his chest, and beneath the stiff mask of his control, he can feel a little answering smile of his own, poking through that blank-marble façade.<p>

Balamb is just stirring, this time of the morning: tiny ant dots of dock workers scurrying between boats and planks, loading cargo, hauling nets; the morning sky is frosted with the vapor of their expletives, formless as ghosts in the pale autumn-tinted air.

Beside him, she hunches into her sweater, walking with both palms cupped around her elbows, and he feels his heart slowly freeze and scab back over as they make their way across the soft folds of hill between Garden and the sleepy harbor town ahead without touching.

The sky is the same color as a sunset above a meadow, painting blood into her raven's wing hair.

He is going to have to kill her. Wherever she is hiding, whatever she is up to…whatever she has been planning, all these months and months she has been folded away into that breath-smoked prison he himself exiled her to- she is going to have to be stopped and it will be up to him, and he has never been less sure of himself, in these sleepless nights when all he can see is Lionheart slicing her open along the line of her sternum.

The thing is he still loves her and he will always love her, no matter what, even if Quistis Trepe has stabled back together his damaged leaking heart with her smiles and her light touches of whip-callused fingers across the pale officer-worker velveteen of his own soldier's hands, going soft around the edges. Rinoa Heartilly was the first to break the seal, chink the armor, and he will never forget that. Killing her is a thought so impossible he can picture it only in shades of Time Compression gray, all distorted around the edges, going soft like his hands: how is he ever supposed to open her down to the bone like these dock workers gutting this morning's catch- maybe what has been left behind is no longer _Rinoa_, but it wears the same smile, and he just-

He just _can't_-

He is wheezing for breath in the cold fall-fragranced air, even thinking about it.

And Ellone Andrin- Sis, who used to coax him from soft sun-dappled dunes into ankle-deep waves while Matron looked on with a smile- her too he might have to kill, once Rinoa is done with her, and it's too much, it is _too fucking much;_ he should have quit years ago, should have never even _taken up _this mantle Cid draped so unthinkingly across his frail childish shoulders-

He was only seventeen.

Today he is on the far slope of twenty-one, barely of legal drinking age, and he is just so very, very _old_-

Perhaps soldiers carry out their lives in dog years, seven for every one; 127 sounds much more proportionate to the way he feels, right now.

His sidelong glance is just a barely perceptible flicker of a thing that rewards him with a crescent moon of pale profile and thought-folded lips, and then he is front and center once more, straight in line with Ma Dincht's squat stone-stooped home.

They keep walking.

He sneaks another glance out of the corner of his eye and wonders if it will be only Rinoa he loses, if in one fatal swoop of last stand heroics he will lose them both, these women he loves: Rinoa because there is no other way to save her, and Quistis because Seifer Almasy has somehow become the most important thing in her life, and she will not give him up to another sorceress, no matter what.

His throat becomes a pinhole, contemplating this.

He has folded himself away inside his own self-imposed solitary confinement for long enough; all he wants now are his friends and his son and someone beside him at night, quietly holding his hand when remembering is too much to handle alone-

He just does not want to be six-year-old Squall Leonhart on a rotten rain-sagging porch anymore, wondering who did not love him enough to keep him.

The sky above his head spreads out and out like a bloodstain, and at his elbow her arm flinches in a shiver that bumps it up against his, and reaching out for her is almost too easy, like he will not be pushed away as soon as she remembers who he is not-

Something booms in the sky and yanks the ground like a carpet, upending it beneath his feet, and now his reach is not so much a desire to touch her but a frantic fumbling for equilibirum-

* * *

><p>Garden disbanded.<p>

In the mornings she will wake up whenever she pleases, and look up from her coffee to watch him stumble blurrily blood-shot into the kitchen with an expletive for the kitchen chair that dares halt his half-asleep stagger-

Except she had him and she lost him, and without him she has nothing that isn't her classroom and her paperwork and her perfectly-polished rows of uniform medals in her closet, reflecting back her pale grief-worn face.

Garden's dispersal is now not so much a relief as an unanchoring: she is unmoored, floating; without Rank A SeeD behind that otherwise unassuming moniker Quistis Trepe she is nothing.

Not without him.

It is pathetic how much she has come to rely on him, without even realizing it: when he worked himself beneath her skin and slid all the way in like a knife going for her heart, he disrupted something vital, some fundamental piece of herself she had always taken for granted.

The one thing she had always been able to say about herself, at least, was that, like it or not, she had never failed at being alone. Perhaps she had never been particularly accomplished at it, perhaps she had always yearned for something more, but years of that awkward authoritative gap between Quistis and her peers, always so much farther behind, had wedged itself in early and never quite slipped, and she had become, if not enamored of it, at least resigned to it.

And now she knows the other side, where she has been loved and cherished and worth dying for, and she is not quite sure she can ever go back.

The half moon arc of bed that is supposed to hold his sleeping body is so very very cold without him.

Her friends will try and bolster her, of course; Zell will put aside his own grief to bring her flowers in the morning and tell her jokes and hold her hand, but the truth is she has always been their backbone and not the other way around: she is the adhesive that holds them all together, and she cannot crumble in front of any of them, these foster brothers and sisters who try so very very hard to keep her happy.

He has always been the only one she has ever crumpled in front of, as a child and years later as the first of them to go took her final failing breaths through feet upon feet of life support cord with Irvine Kinneas slumped over at her bedside. If she has not bent before now, it is because there was never anyone to catch her, but there is a little yielding in every spine, and she has always wanted someone to at least _try_, every so often, when the pressure her young shoulders have been stooped beneath for far too long just becomes too much-

She wants to be inflexible steel always, something hammered and shaped into rigid immobility, the way all the best soldiers are forged-

But there has always been a little flaw somewhere in the design, and not some superficial surface nick, but something deep down in the fundamental components, some grinding of the gears that catches and clicks and sticks every so often. Perhaps it is because they were all simply molded too young, before everything could set quite right, leaving room for maneuvering and shifting and growing: none of them are particularly model soldiers, even if their body counts suggest otherwise. An un-trigger happy cowboy and a martial artist with all the skill and none of the killer instinct; a boy knight who became a man without ever understanding that the basic function of a soldier is to follow orders-

A little bright-smiling matchmaker who loved children and cherry-flavored popsicles and the color of the sun in the ocean.

Squall is perhaps the closest any of them ever came to achieving the lackadaisical regard for life Garden attempted to instill in them all, and even that is only a mask, all starred and spider-webbed and chipped around the edges.

Children make the best killers: she read that in a book somewhere once upon a time, but it is not the truth.

The truth is children make the most damaged killers: they are killers all the same, but root around beneath the surface, and all the interlocking constellations of half-healed scar tissue that comprise them become instantaneously apparent.

She is still thinking about this quote and who had the temerity to make it when something in the sky above her flattens out from a pinhead of cloud into spreading white forever and a roar like an incoming bomber claps her head like someone has taken a rock to either side of her brain-

Hearing is all the little gaps in between white noise-

Squall's lips are soundless shapes in the smoke that layers itself between them-

She is splintering peeling apart _breaking open please help someone _help _the air is a vise and her body the bar getting squeezed flat inside it-_

Rubble smoke and ringing-

Spiraling

Fragments of

Sky/ground/frayed uniform sleeve

Piece themselves uncertainly together-

She cannot hold on.


	25. Interlude Twelve

**A/N: Sorry guys; I've been bad lately about remembering to update. It's not that I'm not working on this story- I just get caught up in writing it and then forget to actually post something. Anyway, a big thank you to everyone still following this, and, also, I do...ah...something kind of mean in the next chapter. I hope you guys can forgive me, and I hope you'll stick with it all the way to the end, because my intention was to bring some closure, and I think that did happen. Just please don't violate me with sharp objects.**

_Dear Selphie,_

_ Today I sat down and watched a bunch of those home videos you were always running around taking. Haven't done that since right after you died. _

_ There's this one with Zell trying to jump his T-board over a ramp he built outta some books of Quisty's- I'm sure you remember; she made him scrub all the toilets in the bathroom right next to the training center as punishment- and there's this part, right before he crashes, where you sneak your face into the frame, and you're wearin' my hat. _

_ I don't have that hat anymore, Selphie. Haven't had it in a long time, actually, not since that bomb some Galbadian soldiers planted on the convoy I was riding on. Never got another one either; funny thing is, though, I always keep reaching for it like it's still there- it's just that much a part of me, I guess, like guys who lose a leg but swear the Hyne-damned thing still itches. _

_ For a long time after you died, I used to do the same thing when I first woke up- reach out for something that wasn't there, I mean. I remembered exactly where you slept and the shape your body made in the sheets next to me; I could put my hand out at this exact ninety degree angle and your hip would be right there, the bony little point of it I always used to tease you about. The first time I woke up and reached out to touch your hip and remembered that it wasn't there and it was never going to be there again, I cried. And the next thousand times after that, Selph. For a long time, I couldn't even get out of bed, because lying there pretending you were going to slip in the door any minute was easier than trying to go on and live my life. _

_ But you know, one day I just put my foot down over the side of the bed, onto the carpet, and there was Dincht snorin' in his bunk just like he always did on nights we didn't lock him out and it was just so normal I thought 'Hell, I can do this'. I took that thought back a million more times throughout the next few months of trying to figure out how to go on without you, but I always kept going anyway. Because that's what you would have wanted me to do._

_ Today when I watched those videos I didn't cry. I wished like Hyne-damned hell I could reach right through the screen and hold you, but I didn't cry. _

_ I remembered this little girl on a front porch trying to get me to eat a crayon for a couple of gil, dressin' me up as her husband for games of house, splashing through wading pools…and all I could think of was she's not gone, because I held onto her. Maybe I couldn't hold you here next to me, keep you in this life and not passin' into the next, but I held on all the same, Selph, and that little girl with the crayon and the woman with the crappy matchmaking skills and the smile that always cheered me up no matter what- she'll never really be gone. _

_ I came to terms with that today. I think I've kinda' lingered on the edge a few times, dipped a toe in the thought, but I've never really gotten it, not until now: we're all gonna' be memories one day, but as long as there's still someone left to keep hold of those memories, we're not gone. _

_ I'll be a memory myself one day, and that's ok. Quisty or Dincht or Squall or even Almasy will be there to pick it up and pass it back and forth and keep remembering it, and then I'll have this legacy that lives on, like that Hyne-damned statue Dincht keeps insisting is going to be built of him. You know I always thought I'd look good in marble or bronze, or whatever the hell it is they cast statues outta. Lot better than him, anyway. _

_ I'd like to think I left them with a lotta good memories. Gave Seifer one more person to put on his Christmas card list at least, not that he ever sends any, the asshole. And you know, I think fate or whatever it is that brought us to where we all ended up…I'd like to think it brought us all together for a reason, our little orphanage gang. Maybe we're not all going to be together forever, maybe we'll drift apart or die or all end up in prison because Quisty finally lost it and ganked Seifer and we all helped her hide the body, but we all _meant _something to each other, now and in the past, and in the future too, I'd like to think. Quisty was lonely as hell before we all hooked up again, trying to make friends with kids her age who couldn't look past the fact that she was their teacher, and so was I, if I'm bein honest. _

_ I've never been all that sure whether or not I believe in Hyne or something beyond this life or anything like that; when you're a soldier watching people die all around you, constantly, you either believe because you need something to cling to, or you think it's all a bunch of shit, because what kind of god would just let that sorta thing keep happening? What sorta god would let children march off to war and women get raped and babies be born dead or all twisted up into something that's so messed up it can't even breathe for itself, you know? That's kinda always the way I've leaned. Just don't get it, myself._

_ But if there's some kind of fate- and I like to believe that's what brought us all together, for better and for worse- then there has to be something driving it, right? Maybe it's Hyne or maybe it's the sorceresses or maybe it's something none of us even know about yet, but if it brought us all together once, then I feel like it'll keep bringing us together, you know? Which means Hyne or not I'm going to see you again one day, and Selph honey, I ain't gonna lie: I'm countin the minutes. _

_ But you know, until then I've got our friends and I've got all these memories of you I'm never gonna let go of, and I'm never gonna be _ok _with you dying, course not, but I guess what I've finally come to understand, after all this time, is that I can survive it. And I can even be happy, doing it. It doesn't mean I don't miss you and it doesn't mean I don't love you and I'll be honest: there's never going to be another girl like you, ever again. But our friends have spent the last year pulling me back from the brink and showing me all the things life can be, when I'm not off playing soldier, and all these little things just keep coming together and adding up, and somewhere along the way, I learned all over again that being alive means more than just getting out of bed in the morning. _

_ I wanted you to know, because I know you'd be happy for me, and I know you'd want me to smile not just because I feel like I have to, but because I really mean it, and I think I've finally made it there again, to that place where I can do that, even if you're not here anymore. _

_ I'll see you again one day, Selph. But until then, I love you, always._

_ Love,_

_ Irvine_


	26. Chapter Thirteen

**A/N: So again...please don't beat me. And I warned you guys this would be a very long chapter- I wasn't kidding. There were a lot of events I wanted to deal with in this one chapter, and while I thought about splitting it in half, I decided to just post it all together, and for that I sincerely apologize to your eyeballs. Also, I worked on this story for a while earlier today, and I realized that I'm actually way closer to the end than I originally anticipated. I knew I was within sight of it, but the way the story decided to go (because I am sometimes convinced I'm not writing it at all, considering all the things that happen that make me go "Hey, where the fuck did that come from?!"), I now find myself working on what is probably the last chapter. There may be one more after it, but I don't believe so, with the way I have everything outlined in my head. What is posted here is almost exactly 100 pages behind the point I'm at in the original Works document, so you guys still have a ways to go, but breathe your sighs of relief, because the end is within sight.**

**Also, I am still planning on doing that AU novelization I mentioned earlier, so that's up once I finish this. I have a lot of ideas for it and think it will be a very interesting project. And also, long as hell, because I don't think there's any way to write 100 pages of novelization and actually manage to do justice to any Final Fantasy game. **

**But then again, you guys would probably all suffer heart attacks if I put out a multi-chap that short anyway. Oh, and, Dee, good to see you again.**

**Chapter Thirteen**

Balamb

Quistis.

Quistis.

_ Quistis!_

Her name is only a soundless formation of lips and tongue and straining vocal cords: in this thundering white noise that is his existence now there are no words, no plaintive screams for dying friends and relatives and lovers-

There is only the fly buzz hum of the ringing in his ears and the distant surf-roar of his heartbeat, or hers: he is not sure anymore which is which, they are so hopelessly entangled in this jumble of arms and legs and shining strands of half-fallen updo he cannot free himself from.

His lips purse and pucker and peel apart, and he hears nothing. Purse, pucker, peel apart: he will keep screaming until something pierces this blurry cotton-bud haze, until she will _look _at him; there is something so very very unnaturally still about the way she sprawls bonelessly underneath him, and in the dirt beneath them his hands scramble frantic fumbling tries for purchase as the ground heaves underneath him once again-

Balamb is on fire.

Flaming segments of people and buildings painted red-orange sunset: an arc of black-burned cheekbone here, a crumbling foundation there; they are all little jigsaw pieces of this whole picture that is slowly section by section resolving into focus before his eyes-

Ma Dincht's home is a flattened cinder-smudge between houses that lean like soldiers nodding off on duty, and then this spreading white forever that blooms and blooms and blooms in the sky above him flicks itself casually in their direction and they tumble as well, one by one by one like Dominoes in a stack or carefully-constructed layers of card house-

Get up.

_Get up!_

Purse, pucker, peel apart.

He can taste his heart in his throat and get up _please _get up _get up_- it's _heading this way_, doesn't she _understand_-

He extricates his legs from hers with a savage yank that does not hurt her enough to stir her even though it shoots fingers of fire all the way up his calves into his thighs, and what this might mean is a truth he is not yet ready to contemplate-

He has her by the arms when the junk shop opposite Ma Dincht's disintegrates: it is as simple as it is there and then suddenly it is not, and in its place is now only a little keloid ripple of a crater scorched charcoal along the edges.

"Quistis!" His shout is finally a whisper he can just barely pick out, and he tries it again as he hauls on her arms, bringing her up belly to belly; from there a bend of his knees and a nudge of his shoulder throws her over him fireman style, and now he cinches one arm down over her thighs just below her ass, and it is not fast enough- there is a billow of spreading white forever right _fucking _here, rippling at the borderline of his boots before he can even try and make a run for it, and beneath the caps of his steel toes he feels his feet begin to blister and burn away-

And spreading white forever unpeels like curtains opening on a new act and from behind this meat-stinking smoke screen steps Rinoa with a smile and both hands on fire.

* * *

><p>He doesn't even get a warning.<p>

One moment he is walking warily beside Rinoa through the residential district of Balamb as its early risers are just beginning to stir, and then suddenly he is on his fucking ass against the side of some hand-painted shop sign, Hyperion in his hand and shrapnel in his fucking leg.

She has just rung his head like a fucking _gong- _what the hell is the bitch's _problem_-

Balamb is on fire.

Balamb is on goddamned _fire_, as far as he can see, puffs of ashes that used to be houses and shops and grandparents out for early morning strolls spiraling around him like Time Compression, it is all that gray-

He can smell the ozone-stench of magic in the air and somewhere off to his left is Ellone, screaming her fucking head off, but none of this is even important anymore:

On the pathway ahead of him is a pile of scorched meat all wrapped up in smoldering flakes of clothing and bristling spikes of shrapnel poking out like nubs of rib bone-

And the hair of this scorched meat pile is just long enough to be scraped back into a little tuft of a ponytail, and the realization that takes only seconds to coalesce in his gut and his throat feels like it goes on forever, as far as he can see, as far as the fires that consume Balamb extend.

He has been hit by a fucking sledgehammer.

His transition to standing is so fast he does not even understand how or when it happened, and now suddenly a hand like a vise comes down on his arm and jerks him back like a puppet as he takes his first faltering newborn step forward, leaving Hyperion behind, propped up against that smoke-scented sign-

The cowboy just took a whole fucking _chest full _of corrugated building siding and if she doesn't let him _go_ he will tear out her _fucking arms_-

"Get off me! _Get off me_!"

"Seifer!"

It does not even matter that it is Ellone's voice he hears instead of Rinoa's: he is being eaten fucking _alive_, doesn't she _get it_? Watching that scorched meat-pile twitch and smoke and drag itself one crumbling inch at a time toward the grass beyond the pavement chews away at him like a rodent in his fucking guts and _get off him_ he doesn't care if she burns down the whole fucking _town_- it doesn't _matter_- it doesn't _fucking matter look at him doesn't she get it_?!

He breaks her hold or she lets go, he can't tell which, and running is like trying to learn how to walk all over again: somewhere between his legs and his brain the intrinsic knowledge of how to put one foot in front of the other gets all scrambled up and ass-fucked backwards, and now his sprint is not so much a sprint as a controlled fall forward.

* * *

><p>It's not over as fast as he wants it to be.<p>

He tongues a wet hack of a cough up from his throat that sprays blood across his teeth, and from the corner of one eye he can see worn-gray boots that used to be mirror-polished black-

They are running toward him.

Somethin' in his chest hurts- maybe his new lungs, going up in flames like everything he can see around him-

The grass is a wintry balm against his cheek, spreading pseudopodia of ice down his neck and across one flame-scorched shoulder- shit it _hurts_- there is no part of his body that doesn't Hyne-damned _burn_-

You know, thing is, he always thought dying was going to be a lot easier: slide into the light, float away on the stream, all a that, easy as flicking a switch somewhere in your brain and watching the light go off forever.

But this is taking too long and now he feels hands slip themselves underneath his head and beneath his neck is a pair of knees that poke the knot of his spine and into the space above him swims Seifer Almasy's face, all twisted up like he is the one on the ground breathing blood and flame and vomit.

He's trying to smile, man, you know? He's just doesn't think it's going to happen right now. But he's glad he's not alone and he's glad it's Almasy here with him, and he _thinks_ that, as hard as he can, in the direction of this man cradling his head and wiping blood off his face and smearing it away from his lips, and if it's really the thought that's all that counts, Almasy'll know.

He hopes he gets it.

* * *

><p>He is already dead. The final breath is just a formality now.<p>

His attempt to speak is a pathetic little gurgle of a thing that paints red his soot-smudged chin, and for the first time in his life, Seifer Almasy has nothing to say.

All around him are buildings that rumple up and collapse in and fan flames and cinders and little black-smeared flecks of all the people who didn't make it into his burning sinuses- they are so fucking inflamed now he can barely even see Irvine Kinneas wrinkling together his bloody lips in his last attempt at speech- but none of this matters either.

Let the town burn. Let the whole fucking population of Balamb be reduced to a black little stain beside the fucking harbor.

He doesn't give a shit anymore.

"Pull it- pull-"

Irvine's request is a rasp he scrapes out of his throat like sandpaper getting pulled out of his gut, and the nod he flops toward the piece of sign post sticking out from his sternum like a finger slaps itself wetly down on Seifer's left arm, propping up his head because he can't do it anymore.

"Out. _Out_."

Pulling it will bleed him out long before help can arrive, but who does Seifer think he's fucking fooling: an emergency air lift to Esthar's best hospital will not save the guy now.

"_Please_, man."

He thinks about Zell Dincht all alone in a house with an unused rifle propped up in the hallway closet like its owner has just stepped outside and will be back any second, and how the fuck is he ever going to tell him?

How the fuck is he supposed to _live with this_-

He brushes loose strands of hair from the fluttering eyes of his friend and he wraps one hand around this smooth-sanded piece of weather-worn metal that has taken Irvine Kinneas away from him, and his voice is not even a little bit steady when he speaks at last.

"No," he says, but it is not this final request he is refusing, it is this whole fucking situation, his whole goddamned _life_ and this smooth-sanded piece of weather-worn metal in his hand and the blood between his fingers, and letting go is as easy as a one, two, three count that pops the sign post free with a suction cup squelch on that final little number-

And now the fingers balled up on his thigh relax and the eyelids squeeze themselves home like this is just what they have been waiting for all fucking along, and maybe letting go is as easy as wiggling a little steel free of the smoking caldera that is now the chest of Irvine Kinneas, but the physical act is not even the half of it, if you want to know the truth.

The truth is he is fucking sorry the best man he has ever known is lying here in his arms instead of the other way around, because life just isn't fucking _fair _like that, sometimes, and the lump in his throat and the heat in his eyes do not represent even a minute percentage of the echoic screaming pain inside him.

What is he going to fucking tell Zell? How the fuck is he going to look Dincht in the eyes and describe to him the hitch of this smoking fucking caldera of a chest slowing down and down and down, how the hell is he supposed to even goddamned _face _him when maybe he could have _stopped _this- a little faster, a little better, a little sooner- a little something _more, _that was all he'd needed to fucking be, and he'd screwed it up- _fuck _him and _fuck _this asshole bleeding out in his arms, he is not _ready _to lose someone else-

Another cough sprays blood dripping down his legs and an audible _hrk hrk hrk _of blood-bubbling throat wheeze pushes loose something he can't understand, and telling the cowboy to shut up is a choked-off little hiss that is so fucking pathetic he strangles it down into a little "Shh…shh," that does its job and seals closed his lips at last.

What he lays his head down against is not so much a chest anymore as a fucking mess of blood and bone and nerve endings that splash like a goddamned puddle beneath his cheek, but forget this:

What is more important is the arm that loops tremulously around the back of his neck and the hand that comes down on the top of his head, a little pathetic half-embrace that is all the cowboy's got left in him.

He squeezes his eyes shut and he counts all of the seconds left in this moment, and one hundred and thirty four later Irvine Kinneas' hand goes slack on his head and tumbles down over the side of his neck, and underneath his cheek the hummingbird tick tick tick of his friend's pulse gives one final start-up wheeze and goes silent forever.

Around him burn the buildings and the grass and the frayed old leather of his friend's boot tips, and he can only kneel here in ankle-deep blood and mud and shit, holding his friend.

He can't even fucking cry, he is that broken.

* * *

><p>Dyin's not so bad after all.<p>

At least he is not the last one left.

* * *

><p>Somewhere around him is a world still going on.<p>

He knows this because there is no more heartbeat underneath his cheek and the ringing in his ears is finally just a steady insectile whine that is more annoying than anything, and now his soundtrack is the screams of Balamb's people and the frail old bone snap of its buildings, and there is nothing else, because his heart has stopped, it's fucking _done_, and he can kneel here like this until the end of the world with that cold dead hand slumped over on the back of his neck and his legs going dead-wood numb underneath him, and he will never fucking get it- he will never fucking _understand_-

The sleeve of his coat is on fire, and the left shoulder of the cowboy's duster: the whole world is just one giant fucking conflagration crawling inch by inch by inch across the grass toward them, and he doesn't give a shit about this either.

The shrapnel in his leg hurts like a bitch and his right forearm smokes like overdone meat and underneath his cheek spreading warm wetness soaks his cheek and the collar of his coat and the hollow of his throat, and he just can't fucking move, you know? Maybe that shrapnel in his leg did more damage than he thought; maybe he's just goddamned giving up- can't blame a guy when he's got nothing left, when he's lost everything he has ever fucking taken a chance on-

He doesn't even know if Quistis is still alive, or Zell, or Ellone, _any _of them- maybe he has lost everyone, maybe this cold-corpse lump beneath his cheek is the last of them and it is now only Seifer Almasy still left hanging on, and for what- for _fucking what_-

He's tired of hanging on. He doesn't want to be _alone_- he wants so _badly _to not be alone that it howls through him and coils up in his chest and stabs him through the heart and seizes his throat with blind red-hazed rage-

And he is suddenly so fucking _pissed_- the cowboy is dead because he wasn't good or fast or smart enough _why couldn't he have been better faster _smarter he has always been the lousiest fucking soldier Seifer has ever _seen_- who the fuck even passed the goddamned guy _anyway_-

He clutches fistfuls of black-burned duster tighter and his eyes squeeze themselves into thin little slits of smoke-shot gashes in his face and something inside of him _screams_, howls, _boils_ up out of his stomach and into his throat, and the cooked-meat stench of his forearm and the red smears of blood going cold and colder and colder across his cheek do not mean a fucking thing, right now.

Their footsteps take a long time to penetrate this world that has shrunk itself down to the hand on the back of his neck and the open gaping maw of chest wound underneath him, and when he feels hands slide underneath his arms and that open gaping maw of chest wound suddenly peel itself free of his cheek, he blinks open his eyes to find a full unit of uniformed SeeDs encircling him, armed to the fucking teeth.

They are arresting him, or executing him: something like that.

He doesn't give a shit which.

* * *

><p>Quistis has come loose in his arms, and only a last second scrambling keeps her from the ground beneath his feet, and across from him Rinoa tilts her head and squeezes closed her fists, and the flickers of flame that vein her palms shut off like lights going out, just like that.<p>

He can feel the nervous flick flick flick of his heart in his chest, pounding in his ear and his throat and the insides of his knees: he is all heartbeat now, a single little flicker of movement in the stiff-corpse stance his body has shaped itself into.

"Hi, Squall," she says like they are only casually passing each other in the hall, he on his way to the office, she to the cafeteria for a cup of coffee, and his arms loop themselves tighter between Quistis and this woman he used to love, and if he just hadn't been too Hyne-damned _stupid _to bring Lionheart-

He is still not sure he can kill her, but any faint little sliver of hope that she is still somewhere inside this thing before him has burned up right alongside the whole town, and now her softly sweet little smile is only a sharp burning pain in his chest, reminding him of everything he cannot and will not ever get back.

"Rinoa." These three short syllables are all jumbled up in his throat like a clot, and he can barely swallow around them. "_Stop_, please-" He doesn't know why he bothers: there is nothing left of the woman he loved that can still be reached. He is pleading to a void, starless black forever that is as hollow as his chest.

"I didn't want to do this."

His incredulity is a choked-off expletive that might tip her over the edge, and because there is nothing but the singed cuffs of his sleeves between Rinoa Heartilly and Quistis Trepe unconscious in his arms, he says nothing: survival odds are a razor thin wire he tightropes one flinching shuffle of a step at a time, wavering.

"I really didn't," she insists, and there is enough regretful melancholy in her voice to make him think that she might mean it, just a little. "I _had _to, though. They said disloyalty has to be punished, and I know it wasn't right, but what you did wasn't either- I was all alone up there, and I was so scared, Squall. And I had to make you _understand _how bad you hurt me."

He can taste his horror in his throat, it is so thick.

"I'm sorry people had to die. But that's the way it has to be from now on, isn't it? Me against them?" she asks sadly. "Me against you?"

He says nothing.

"I remember I really, really loved you, a long time ago. I can't anymore, though. Not after you hurt me. They were the only ones there for me, who really cared about me. They didn't just pretend to, the way the rest of you did. The rest of you left me all alone and scared up there."

He is sorry. He really, truly is- when he sealed her up in that capsule he shut up a part of himself he could never really get back, he _agonized _over the decision even though he understood there was no other option, and how can she just stand here like what he did was _nothing_, just a throwaway choice he did not even think twice about-

He loved her. He _loved _her. _He loved her_. He still loves the girl she used to be, the doe-eyed looks and the cutely pursed lips and the way she could get him to smile, no matter what, no matter how much he didn't want to: she pried him open and crawled underneath his skin and taught him that love does not have to be a weakness but a gift, and he will never forget that. He will never forget _her_, as she used to be, in a meadow under a sunset; but that Rinoa is dead and gone and burned to ashes for good measure, and he can never get her back, not for the rest of his life, no matter how hard he prays or dreams or wishes, and what she has become now the old Rinoa would have wanted him to stop, no matter what.

But it is still a knife through his heart, even thinking about it.

He has a couple of spells stocked, low level practice stuff he meant to use in the training center later that night, but he cannot use those anyway, not with Quistis tucked up against his chest like this, just barely alive. She will deflect anything he can throw at her anyway, high level or otherwise: all he can do is stand here and pray she decides to spare them both, because one casual flick of her hand will end everything, and maybe she thinks he deserves it- maybe he _does_- but please not Quistis, Quistis who deserves better, who was going to get _out_, who was going to be _free_-

"Can I see her?" Rinoa asks quietly, indicating the bundle in his arms with a nod of her head.

"No," he breathes, and a fumble of a step backward puts another six inches between them, and what the _hell _does he thinks he's going to do, against this woman who has just razed Balamb to the ground with nothing more than what is sizzling in her veins-

She takes Quistis from him like a child, and he lets go too easily, because he is terrified Rinoa is not above some infantile tug of war that will tear her to pieces between them.

"She's so pretty," Rinoa whispers, smoothing a strand of soot-smudged hair from one ash-blackened cheek.

A nonchalant clench of her hand cracks the pale graceful column of Quistis Trepe's throat, and through smoke-smeared skin he watches slivers of vertebrae feather and fan out, streaked crimson.

"_No_!" he screams, and his lunge is a hysterical flinch of a thing that hurls him toward them both, and stopping him is so easy it is pathetic: another flick of her hand and he is flying, he is _soaring_, and landing is all twisted ankles and screaming shoulder joints and the soft clover-scented prickle of grass beneath his cheek-

"I just wanted you to know," she whispers.

Something is laid gently down beside him in the grass, and a foggy blink resolves this fetal-curled something into Quistis Trepe looking sleepily up at him through little web-fine layers of lashes, tinted neautral smoke-gray like the rest of her.

She stares at him long enough for Squall to assemble all his thoughts into something vaguely coherent, something that convinces him he is not seeing things after all, she is _alive_, she is alive and awake and he wants to hold her so badly not doing so is a physical jolting ache in his arms-

And then her eyes slide closed once more, and she does not open them again.

* * *

><p>He is beyond pain.<p>

He is beyond fucking _anything_.

It blurs his days together into one long smear of gray ceiling and hard-steel bunk, poking him in the kidney.

He thinks he has been here for two days when Pubes shows up at last, but this is only an estimation: it may have been weeks since they first brought him to this tiny fucking little holding cell in Garden's basement, and left him here to die.

Or rot. Whatever.

Not giving a shit makes things easy, at least. Don't have to eat, don't have to think, don't even have to fucking move, if you don't want to. He makes himself into a blank slate that will never be painted over again: hopes and dreams and wishes and happy laughing memories, fuck 'em all, he doesn't want a goddamned thing to do with _any _of them.

He can eat a bullet or they can do it for him, but he is not interested in a world that has narrowed to just him and Puberty King Leonhart with that familiar little constipated forehead wrinkle: kill him now, in fact, because this asshole's face is the last thing he wants to see.

No, scratch that.

He does not want to go to his death with Squall _fucking _Leonhart's face as his final memory.

He turns his own face toward the wall.

"Irvine's dead."

So he's one of those just-yank-the-fucking-band-aid-right-off people. So is Seifer, if he's being completely honest, but don't kick a man when he's fucking down: this statement brings feeling back into the dead coal-lump of his heart, just a prickle at first, and then a spreading sheet of fire down into his gut and up into his throat, and the hand on his chest curls into a fist and one foot twitches inside his boot, and the long scorch-line along his right arm comes undone along the seams, just a little. Whoever Cured it did a shitty fucking job anyway.

"I know. I was there."

"Did you have anything to do with…what happened?"

This question is so blatantly fucking stupid a tilt of his head and a narrowing of his eyes is all the reply he gives, and Pubes shifts from one foot to the other and folds both hands behind him, and now there is another little prick of feeling, way down deep:

He wants to smear Pubes' face across his fist, and this desire is so warm-his-fucking-toes familiar he almost smiles, just fractionally.

"I had to ask. You've been with Rinoa for a while now. We can't just let you out, until we know what kind of damage she's done."

He rolls his head back to face the wall, and now his other hand joins the first on his chest, and he laces them together without a word.

"The SeeD team that took you captive in Balamb said you didn't resist. Both your guards report you haven't exhibited any…strange behavior."

"Good for them."

There is a little frustration in the commander's voice when he speaks now. "I don't want to keep you here, Seifer. Quistis…"

"She's dead, isn't she." There is no reason to believe everything hasn't been taken from him. He braces himself for what's coming: gonna' be a real slap to the balls, coming from Pubes.

"Zell's safe," Squall tells him instead. "He's helping with clean-up and reconstruction in Balamb. Rinoa just tore the town down and then left; we've got cadets and as many SeeDs as we can spare out there helping."

The fist that is constricting his heart eases just slightly: Wuss is all right. Breathing is just a little easier, knowing this, but this squeezing in his chest is not done yet, because he is still waiting for the real blow, the final one, the one that will split him wide and leave him raw, empty his guts all over this damp mildew floor.

"Quistis is dead, isn't she?" he gets out, punctuating each word like it is the end of the sentence itself, and outside his cell he hears shuffling and a throat clear full of phlegm or tears or whatever the fuck Pubes has saved up in there, and he can't look, he doesn't want to fucking know what that constipated forehead wrinkle has turned itself into, thinking about this woman both of them love-

"She's in a coma. Dr. Kadowaki has her under observation in the infirmary. We were in Balamb when Rinoa attacked the town, and all that magic…She's in bad shape." He trails off with both hands in his pockets, and it is not until Seifer observes this that he even realizes he has shifted his head once more, that he is staring dead-on into the eyes of this man whose fear is so nakedly palpable it is a physical fucking blow to that dead coal-lump heart.

Squall fucking _Leonhart _is showing emotion. Squall fucking _Leonhart _is terrified, devastated-

Anger layers itself like smoke inside his chest, one stratum on top of another on top of another, until he is all rage and nothing else, and coming to his feet is not something he has done in days: his knees buckle underneath him, but a hand on the bars stops that crumpling in its tracks and adrenaline pounds enough blood back into his limbs to keep him standing, and now it occurs to him that Squall is standing close enough to his cell to grab, close enough to _hit_-

And now out through the bars shoots his fist, flaring out into a hold the guards see, but not in time to stop, and a one-handed yank slaps Squall Leonhart's cheek up against the bars of his cell hard enough to ring them like a fucking bell. "She's _dying _and you're going to keep me _locked up in here_?"

He can kill him right now- a fractional squeeze on the asshole's throat and there goes his fucking _windpipe_-

"Let me out, Pubes, _now_."

The guards come running up to save the day, and another yank and subsequent clang of Pubes' face hitting these bars between them stops both armed men in their tracks, and if it weren't for all this red-tinged rage boiling up out of his heart and painting crimson everything he can see, he might just take a moment to savor the looks on their faces: wide-eyed shit-has-hit-the-fan panic, just like the horror in the eyes of his victims back in the good old days of the Disciplinarian Committee.

He brings his own face close enough to the bars that they are almost cheek to cheek, and to Squall's credit he does not even flinch: good for Puberty King.

Rinoa left him some of his balls after all.

"Let me out of here fucking _now _and I won't rip your throat out. If she fucking dies while you're keeping me locked in here these bars aren't going to save you, Pubes. I don't give a shit what happens to me, get it? If your little butt buddy guards over there fuck me to death with their rifle barrels, I will die with a fucking smile on my face as long as I rip your lungs out through your asshole first."

"Sir?" one of the guards asks tentatively, thumbing the snap on his holster. "I've got non-lethal riot rounds loaded for prisoner control; I can hit him without endangering you, sir. Just give the order."

He tilts his head just far enough to the side to get the guard in his peripheral vision. "You're next, asshole."

"Sir?"

An entire battalion of rifles aimed at his chest would not stop him now: he is red fucking _hot _with all this nuclear rage burning off in his system, and if Pubes thinks he is going to keep Seifer fucking Almasy from that infirmary while the woman he loves slips quietly further and further away from him, then he's about to show him just how goddamned wrong he is.

"Let them shoot me. I'll wake up eventually," he snarls, jerking again on the collar he has wrapped his hand in. "_Do it_. Do it- let her die while you've got me locked up here like a fucking animal, and see what happens."

"Sir?"

* * *

><p>Seifer is so close he can feel the heat of his breath on the side of his face, or maybe that's the warmth of all his anger, blistering through to the surface.<p>

The man radiates fury, casts it off in sheets of heat wave: it is so tangible it is almost something Squall can reach out and brush with his fingertips. The bars of Garden's holding cell scorch winter along his cheek, and from the corner of one eye he watches one of the guards thumb off the safety on his weapon, orders be damned, and now there is another sharp clang and half a second of anesthetic bliss before the numbness in his cheek wears off and he feels slow wet heat trickle like a finger down the right side of his face-

And he gropes back with one hand and lifts it palm out, and in Seifer's eyes flares something that closes fear like a noose around his throat and spasms his heart into a tiny clenched fist of a thing-

And then suddenly all the pieces of this moment- raised hand, raised fist, raised weapon- click together and resolve into something that flickers in the eyes of Seifer Almasy like a light coming on, and now suddenly he can breathe again, now suddenly there is no more bar imprinting his cheek or scorch mark of winter frosting his face, and for just an eyeblink they eye one another, rival to rival-

"Stop," Squall orders coldly as their guns swing wide and take aim and _click click _to uncertain immobile ready. "Stop. Don't shoot him."

Hooked up to a machine that does all her breathing for her is Quistis Trepe fighting her own mortality, and if it were Rinoa, a thousand armed guards and concerned commanders would not keep him from her.

Maybe there are slivers of a sorceress buried somewhere deep inside him, but what Squall sees now is a man teetering on the edge: he has pounded flat his face into hammer-worked steel, emotionless, but around the edges spread fissures of stress lines, red-crayon squiggles in his eyes and black-moon crescents underneath them, and he still can't forget all those hushed descriptions of finding Seifer Almasy hunched over Irvine Kinneas' body while the world burned on around him, saying and doing and resisting nothing.

He looks like Squall feels, all hollowed-out inside, brittle framework and nothing else.

And the thing is, maybe he does not like him, maybe there is a raw festering seed of genuine hatred for Seifer Almasy, kindling somewhere way down deep inside him, but what passes between them now is understanding, and the fist that is Squall's heart clenches tighter, rolls itself closer, because maybe he is making the wrong choice, maybe he is screwing them all, Garden and Quistis Trepe and Zell Dincht, everyone that is left for him to still care about-

But it is the only choice he can make.

He adjusts his collar at his throat and inclines a subtle slant of a nod toward the man behind these bars that have left behind cold-winter imprints of themselves on his face, and he says, "Open his cell."

* * *

><p>She dreams of dry candy-stick bones beneath mirror-polished boots, peppermint brittle.<p>

Each step is a flat marrow-crack of a femur, a clavicle, a humerus, layered on beds of ash that puff up pale mushroom clouds of cinders like smoke-

Each inhalation is fire, ice, _acid_-

She walks.

She has been walking forever, she is relatively certain.

The dry candy-stick bones beneath mirror-polished boots mound up and fold slowly into rolling hills of black-baked skeletons that peter out and out and out, the farther she walks, and in the distance are low-hanging coils of smog the color of storm clouds stitching themselves together above a cottage by the sea.

She almost remembers this-

This is something she knows, something she has _seen _before-

She walks.

Where am I-

Is there anyone- no one- please _someone_-

Her questions are fleeting figments of thoughts in her mind: what slides from her lips and drip drip drips off her tongue are not words but little drip drip drops of red that flare gray where they hit the fog beneath her boots-

Monochromatic mist- where has she _seen _this before-

Hello-

She walks.

The dry candy-stick bones are gone: what is here with her now are only the muffled thud thud thuds of her boots in the dust and the _hh hh hh _of her breath in her throat, scraping sandpaper hisses of inhalations down her throat and into her lungs and she is on _fire_-

Or she was on fire-

Splintering apart, slit open along the seams-

She does not remember.

She walks.

Somewhere in this monochromatic mist is a witch's castle and a handsome knight and six little boys and girls, playing soldier-

She walks.

Monochromatic mist becomes slivers of white-gold beneath her feet, and now the drip drip drops of red from between her lips and off her tongue stay crimson where they hit the ground underneath her: breadcrumbs through the woods, all the way to a witch's castle in the trees and a handsome knight waiting to greet her-

Hello- hello _anyone_- where am I-

The slivers of white-gold become flakes and then soft humps of hills and finally folds upon folds of blonde sun-scorched sand-

She walks.

Hello- hello please someone _answer _me is anyone else here where _is _here what the _hell _is going on-

From the corners of her eyes is a shadowy flick flick flick like childhood monsters in a closet, boiling out from beneath the cracks to slither forth across lemon-polished wood-

Hello?

She stops.

There are starched patches of garden, in between folds upon folds of blonde sun-scorched sand.

She remembers-

_-smiling mothers and daughters and brothers amongst tongues of orange fire and mars red and bruised wine she has never _seen _so many colors before-_

The flowers are dandelion skeletons in their withered stalks.

The monochromatic mist beneath her feet has become folds upon folds of blonde sun-scorched sand and waves at her back, whispering, whispering, whispering but it is still here somewhere, in all this pressure that sags down against her shoulders and hunches her in upon herself, and its fingers tug loose small corpse-heads of orange fire and mars red and bruised wine, and in clumps of her hair snag these unseen fingers, tugging tugging tugging-

The shadowy flick flick flick in her peripheral vision bunches up and gathers together and resolves into something substantial-

She turns.

Her hands are full of corpses the color of sunset.

Orange fire and mars red and bruised wine- _where should I put this one matron over here I think it'll look pretty next to the purple one_- these colors used to _mean _something to her-

This substantial something that was once only a shadowy flick flick flick in the corners of her eyes slithers out from the trees that spring up around her-

-the trees too she _knows _the trees that one over there used to hold a boy and his stick sword and that one over there a smiling little girl in her yellow-sun dress-

The dress is scabbed over with mold and the little girl's eyes are now glazed cataracts of sea-polished stones, blank-

Her hands full of corpses the color of sunset spasm shut and clench once and between her fingers leak granules of red-mud ash-

_-balamb is a slit layered over in lash and she can see nothing but star-fire white and coal-smudge black going on forever-_

The substantial something steps beyond the trees and into the light, and there is something missing in the sand beneath her bare red-ribboned feet-

White-moon headstones in the sun and where is this thought _coming _from-

"Quisty?"

The bare red-ribboned feet are all done up in blood and little white slivers of dry candy-stick bones and beneath her boot goes one of the dandelion skeletons in its withered stalk- she didn't _mean _to matron she's _sorry_- and another stumble puts a foot of space between her and this substantial smiling something hovering in the sand where there are supposed to be white-moon headstones and little girls with empty marble-glass eyes-

"Quisty?"

The substantial smiling something is no longer smiling.

The sun in the sky stitches together constellations in her hair, bright diamond chips of stars in midnight galaxy-

"Quisty?" A scrape of one red-ribboned foot through the sand rubs winter fingers down her spine and back again she stumbles, she _spins_- don't come any closer _stop don't come any closer Balamb is burning/folding/_dying _Balamb is dying and in Rinoa's hands are sputters of flame that paint white the backs of her lids-_

"Quisty, _please_! Don't run. I'm not going to hurt you. I can't hurt you here. Quisty?" The constellations in her hair are now bright drops of tears in her eyes. "Quisty?"

The monochromatic mist is back.

She is not sure where it comes from: is this woman with the stars in her hair and the stars in her eyes making it, is _she _making it; why does it seem so _familiar-_

"Quisty, it's ok, I promise, I won't hurt you, I'm so sorry- I'm really, really _sorry_, Quisty, please, say something; it's been so long since I've _talked _to anyone-"

A swipe of her tongue and a hiccup of her throat unearths her voice and pastes together all the millions upon millions of fragments it keeps wanting to break apart in- "Where am I?" -is the first thing she asks and the woman with her red-ribboned feet in graveyard sand takes a breath and wipes her eyes and smiles like this one question is an entire world- an entire _universe_- off her shoulders-

"Quisty, I'm sorry, but I didn't know any other way to talk to any of you- I'm trapped and they won't let me out but you're _here _somehow and I don't know what happened or how I did it, but I'm so glad to see you, Quisty-"

_-his hair becomes coronal white flame in the glare of her magic and between them is suddenly a stardust veil that sucks away all her strength and collapses her like a puppet into Squall Leonhart's arms-_

There are still flecks of red-mud ash on her palm, stuck in the grooves of her life line, and half a second is all the time it takes her eyes to flick from these red-mud flakes to the graveyard sand getting all eaten up by the monochromatic mist she cannot quite place, crawling and crawling and crawling-

_ -up the tips of her boots and over her ankles to make cold-winter spirals across her calves and around her thighs and someone please _help _she does not want to be lost here all alone where _is _everyone_-

The red-mud ash in her hands is all that is left of her mother's garden and the girl with the cataract eyes and the yellow-sun dress is gone, long gone, and left behind is only Quistis Trepe who was supposed to protect them, who was supposed to keep them _safe_, who stands beneath hot noon sunlight holding her mother's dead withered garden-

"Rinoa?"

"It's me, Quisty. Really, _really _me," the substantial smiling something whispers with more tears in her eyes and tremors in her voice, and half a dozen tentative strides put her within arms length, roses in her cheeks and color in her lips, and this is _Rinoa_, Rinoa alone and nothing/no one else-

This substantial smiling something that is Rinoa alone and nothing/no one else folds herself into a little sobbing ball against Quistis' chest, hiccupping and babbling pleas and twisting into thin frayed strands the threads in her sweater that have come loose.

Time Compression gray creeps around their ankles and patches the garden in chess board squares of charcoal, and in the sky above them the sun flickers and burns out- _Balamb flickers and flares and smolders and in her lungs bubble acid and blood and flames she is being _burned alive_-_

"Rinoa," she whispers with a lump in her throat and coal in her chest, "What did you do?"

* * *

><p>"Is this a dream?"<p>

"I'm not sure. I don't think so. I mean, I think you started off dreaming, and then I came in, and this is part dream, and part me…or something. I don't know. I did something. I didn't mean to- it was just like I was reaching out, because I was scared and trapped and they wouldn't let me through, and all of a sudden I was here, and I could see you walking through all this mist, you know like in Time Compression- that's what it all reminded me of at first. I was here and there was no one else, nothing, and then you came along." She looked down at her pink-painted fingernails, chewed down to little white bone splinters. "I was scared to talk to you."

A breath between her lips stirs the hairs come loose from her neat fishtail of an updo. "Who is 'they', Rinoa?"

"I don't know. They're just voices in my head. They're not here, though. I don't hear them anymore. At first they were just there and I ignored them, even though they scared me. And then I started to do things I didn't mean to, I didn't _want _to, and it was like they were in control and I was trapped behind a wall, and I could never get out, not to warn you guys or stop anything that was happening-"

She picks at the bone splinters of her paint-peeling nails, spreading out the flapping skirt of her duster in the gray-patched garden underneath her. "All I can do is watch, Quisty." Her voice is only a faint fading murmur of a whisper now. "And I want to die."

The coal that is her heart in her chest compresses itself into a hard-diamond lump, and she kneels in the Time Compression fog building itself up and up and up like armor between her and this pale hunched women with her knees to her chin. "Rinoa. Don't say that."

"I do," she says dully, looking out away into the forest. "I'm _stuck_, Quisty. It's like someone's sealed me up in this little box, and I can hear and see everything that's going on, but nothing I say or do _means _anything, and it's like someone's wearing this mask of me, and doing all these horrible things, you know? It's still me inside, somewhere. That's the worst part." She sniffles and wipes her nose.

"None of us ever wanted-" Quistis pauses with a frown on her face because somewhere off in the distance is a susurration like incoming ocean tide, except this incoming ocean tide carries with it words and exhalations and rough bitten-off expletives that end in metallic tinkling crashes-

She _knows _that voice-

"What are you listening to, Quisty?" Rinoa asks softly, and a cock of her head and a soft frown of her own clears the confusion from her eyes and the hard line from her lips, and now a long slow nod of her head puts her face at eye level with her knees, still tucked neatly beneath her chin.

"I heard them earlier- I just didn't understand it. I'm in the infirmary, I think. It was Squall and Dr. Kadowaki earlier. And now-"

"Seifer," Rinoa puts in quietly when words fail her, when the lump in her throat is suddenly a hot wet boulder of a thing: he is _ok_, he is safe and alive and perhaps sitting beside her, perhaps holding her hand, stroking her hair-

And then his words each become little boulders of their own, _tock tock tocking _down through her understanding like pebbles chattering down layers of slick mold-mottled stone into dry well bottom-

-_So what you're fucking saying she's not going to wake up-_

She says nothing.

She cannot say anything.

She has lost everything after all: a house by the sea and this man in her arms, this man who sounds normal, who sounds like _himself_, strained tight around the edges -they were going to get another chance, they were going to find a _way_-

The red-mud ashes at her feet wink up from beneath the mist, and somewhere inside of her something collapses like Balamb tumbling down and down and down into mushroom skirts of Time Compression gray.

_-I didn't _say _that Seifer I said I don't know what's wrong with her. I can't guarantee you anything. Calm down. You're destroying my infirmary-_

"Am I going to wake up?" she asks with no inflection in her voice or hope in her heart.

"I don't know, Quisty. I don't think I made any of…this." She waves her hand vaguely through the air around them. "I think you were dreaming, and I just sort of…stepped into it. I don't understand what I did to you. But it's my fault, isn't it?"

"No. It's mine," she says dully, and does not elaborate.

There is no need for elaboration.

Once upon a time there lived a rank A SeeD called Quistis Trepe, and this rank A SeeD called Quistis Trepe was supposed to be perfect, was supposed to be the living symbol of everything Garden had built its foundation upon, was supposed to _protect her friends _and single-handedly fix all their problems-

And she did not.

It is this simple.

She could not save Selphie and she cannot save Rinoa- she cannot even save _herself_: the rest of her existence will consist of this swirling half-phantom of childhood oceanfront whispering and lulling and beating into languid uncaring haze all her fears and her worries and her sick gut-twists of regret, and one day she will lie down in the graveyard sand where there are supposed to be white-moon headstones glinting under hot noon sun, and she will close her eyes for a very long time.

She will not remember Seifer Almasy's rough soldier's hands or Irvine Kinneas' hat tilted just so on his forehead-

Zell Dincht's horrible poetry and clumsily consoling head pats-

Squall Leonhart's hard diamondine mask dissolving into softly smiling wonder as he looks down at his new son in his arms-

This mist will chip away at it all, until one day these memories are all gathered up into a little dust bin corner of her mind, until finally they melt and run and drip drop by drop by drop into nothing-

"Quisty."

She looks past her friend into her mother's dead gray garden and blinks the world back into focus around her.

"Squall and I…we have a son, don't we?"

"Yes."

"You know what's weird is I…it's like I forgot, until I came here. Here, everything's so much clearer, you know? I like it better. I can't hear them, and you're here- I'm finally not all _alone_- and I can remember stuff like that now. How could I forget that, you know?" She picks more paint from her fingernails; from their tips coil curlicues of cheery pink acrylic that become bright flakes in the soil beneath her feet. She holds them up for inspection with something that is not quite a smile. "I haven't painted my nails in…forever. Since Selphie and I used to have girls' night, 'member, Quisty? We dragged you into Selphie's room and forced you to sit still while we did all these different makeovers on you, and Selphie wanted your hair big, like _really _big, and she put all these curlers in it and the boys showed up to distract us while Zell tried to rescue you."

There is a squeezing in her throat that wrings her reply down to a thin little whisper. "I remember. He shoved me out the bathroom window and had to take my place as Selphie's lab rat, as punishment."

Rinoa smiles shyly and toes a line through the dirt. "Quisty? What's…what's his name?"

"Adan," she replies without asking for clarification. "He's beautiful. Squall's devoted."

She has to get out a little hiccup before she can go on. "I always knew he'd be a good dad, you know? Because of his own relationship with his…I knew he'd want to make sure it didn't turn out that way again." She looks up with tears in her eyes, and pulls her knees in tighter. "Don't let me hurt either of them. I don't want Adan to be all alone like Squall was, you know? I don't want him to think his dad didn't love him enough to stick around. Don't let me take Squall away from him, ok? Do whatever you have to."

"Rinoa, I-"

"I'm going to try something," Rinoa says abruptly, and closes her eyes.

And suddenly there is a _pushing_, suddenly she is being torn/shoved/_yanked_-

The mist thickens and peels apart and slaps itself back together again-

Cream-painted ceiling tile stained watermark brown and coin-sized yellow in her eyes and a voice she has missed so very, very much-

_-What's going on? Hey! Answer me! What are you doing-_

_ -I think she's coming around- give me a little _room_-_

"Get your fucking hands _off _me, Pubes- goddammit, let me _see_-"

"Keep your pants on, young man. Give her a moment. Quistis, can you hear me?"

"Quistis?"

"Seifer, please! I can't have you crowding me. Quistis, please say something."

"Get _off _me, Pubes, before I break your fucking face-"

"_Seifer_! Squall, escort Mr. Almasy out if he can't see fit to behave himself-"

"Fucking-"

There is a loud crash and a grunt and an ensuing string of expletives, and in the background is the soft _thud thud thud _of a clipboard thumping hollowly echoing off someone's skull-

"Ow, fuck! Knock it off! Goddammit, _stop it_!"

"What did I _tell _you about busting up my infirmary, young man-"

A soft shuffling precedes a presence at her elbow that just grazes her side, and a rubber-coated hand at her eye lifts her unresponsive lid and sweeps her pupils with that coin-sized yellow once again, and now sensation begins to trickle slowly back and back and back into her stiff frostbitten limbs-

"Well, I suppose you certainly heard all of that. Are you there, Quistis? Please say something, before your fiancé finishes destroying my entire office." Another graze along her side becomes cold rubber-wrapped fingers reaching for her wrist. "Quistis, sweetheart? Can you hear me?"

"Quistis. Fucking _say _something. Please. _Please_," he snaps, and there is so much naked need in his voice it shrinks her heart inside her chest, and she shakes free the last stubbornly clinging cobwebs of a mist-layered beach, because he needs her.

She opens her eyes.

* * *

><p>"Bye, Quisty," she whispers.<p>

Beyond the garden is the ocean.

She shakes loose the dirt from her duster and the red-mud ash from her feet, and each little step forward is an inexorable tug on the lead line that controls her-

No: This time she's doing it _herself_, dammit-

These are her own steps and this is her own will, propelling her farther and farther and farther out-

She closes her eyes.

Cold eats into her courage and chatters her teeth and makes of her toes little blue-capped slabs she cannot feel anymore, and she hugs both arms to her chest and lays herself back into this winter embrace before she can change her mind.

She is certain it will not kill her, but it's nice to pretend.

* * *

><p>The sun is a stain behind gray-autumn sky, showing faintly through layers of blue-steel skin.<p>

He watches the clouds move in like rot, all midnight bruise and clot the color of the ground beneath his feet.

Brittle peppermint sticks of grassland that crack like glass: this is what is left of Balamb now. Brittle peppermint sticks of grassland and fishermen ash and folded accordions of children baked into brittle-clay figurines in the dust-

He leans on his shovel.

In front of him is Wuss putting his back into it, his breath spiraling up in cumulous loops that paint white the oven-fired knolls that once formed the framework of Ma Dincht's house, his ridiculous fucking marshmallow puff of a jacket jumbled into an unfolded pile at his feet. He rests his chin on the hands he folds tightly across the handle of his shovel and watches his friend shovel, chuck, shovel, chuck, his sweat a diamondine pattern on his shirt, his arms bunching, relaxing, bunch, relax, rinse and fucking repeat.

Wuss has been like this for the last two hours, ever since Kadowaki chased him out of the infirmary, and if you want to know the truth, he's a little fucking unnerved by all this silence. And watch close enough, and there goes the arm up across the eyes and then back down again, a sniffle, a pause, a shift of the hands on splintered wood, and y'know, he's getting fucking _sick _of watching the sniveling little shitheel anyway-

It's breaking his goddamnedheart.

The guy's down a best friend and a lover and possibly a mother, and what the fuck else is fate going to throw his way, the vicious cunt-whore-

"Wuss," he finally snaps, yanking his shovel out of the crumbling black sand that is the street underneath him, "Are you ok?"

There is a ripple through the sweat-stained shoulders that pulls his head up from its slump and back into this thousand yard fucking stare he's had going on for hours now, aiming it out over the wrinkles of black-scorched foundation that is all he has left of his mother and his childhood, and up goes the arm again and around that broken goddamned mother_fucking _heart clenches his chest in something like a hiccup getting stuck, and he boots his shovel back down into the rubble and leans on it once more, because he doesn't know what else to do with his hands.

"Yeah," Zell replies: a waver, a hitch, a quivering around the edges, and he almost pieces the word together into something whole. "It's just…I don't wanna' find her, but I _do_, y'know? Because I can't stand thinking about her…stuck under all of that." He lifts his arm again. "It's just kinda'…everything, you know, I mean…man, Irvine and Ellone and…what if I _do _find her, man? Like, what if she's buried under this last little pile, and she's- she's-"

And then he sits down in the debris and open slam the fucking floodgates: his shovel gongs on cement beneath this silt-layer of black covering everything and up slaps one palm over his soot-streaked face, and Seifer has never seen anyone shake this hard before, this fast.

There's no opening tremor, no tentative feeler of undulation through shoulders that hunch into bundles of cramp up next to his ears, just blurry half-sentences he slurs through lips smeared salt-snot and acetylene-coal, and the shovel in Seifer's own hands bells a second echoing crash as his fingers seizure open and spasm back into empty fists.

"I'm sorry- I didn't even cry when they brought him back to Garden- like I _couldn't_, with him laying there…I couldn't even _say _anything, man, and Ma…Ma…"

All around him are the sounds of shovels scraping pavement, of plastic-crackling bags zipped tight around wax-doll townspeople; softly hiccupping cries of newly-orphaned children, and it's all in one ear and out the other because he's never seen the asshole like this before, not even when they zipped Irvine Kinneas into one of those plastic-crackling bags and rolled him away down long white-marble corridors that will never stop reminding him of knife-squealing wheels catching and sticking and clicking over into smooth rubber-soled turns once more, and the knot in his throat is so fucking hard he can't say a single goddamned word.

A step and a crouch and he is in front of his friend with nothing to say, because what the fuck _is _he supposed to say- they took the cowboy away to be painted like a goddamned whore and three days from now they will all cluster around those pink-painted cheeks exclaiming over how _peaceful _he looks, like he's drifted off to sleep and he'll be up any minute, but stick it up your fucking _ass_, preacher, he's _dead_, ok, fucking _gone_-

And he is still too vacant inside to cry. He is all stoppered up, and it hurts, it fucking _burns_, and one day it's all going to come boiling up and babbling out, but for now slight pressure on the back of Zell's head tips him forward against Seifer's shoulder, and he lets him lean there like that for a long time with both hands folded between his knees and Wuss soaking his shirt like a fucking baby.

Above their heads the clouds peel themselves off that stain behind gray-autumn sky and sew themselves back together, and he blinks away ash and glares up into the sun.

The wails become hiccups, and at last unravel into sporadic little sniffs, and through his worn-thin T-shirt he can feel something that might almost be a smile.

"I feel so safe in your arms, man," Zell says, and the crack in his voice has been glued carefully back together, still fragile along the edges.

He looks down at blonde spikes powdered silver and now his own smile fractures his heart and the sky above him blurs itself into yellow that leaks into gray and spills itself all over blue, and a long one-two-three squeeze of a blink and his eyes are dry again.

The snarl in his voice is as steady as he can make it. "All right, get the fuck off me. I can already feel your dick poking me in the ass." A shove puts half a foot of safe space between them, and now Zell dusts himself off and picks himself up, and both hands in his pockets and a duck of his head muffle the "Thanks, man," he aims at the ground beneath his feet, and one final swipe of his arm across his eyes is all he needs to keep going.

* * *

><p><em>Licorice-whip muscles melt into live wire puddles and she cannot <em>move-

_And all around her Balamb rips itself into confetti and spreads ash in the wind and off in the distance is a tiny yellow-sun constellation of a man-_

_ Is she imagining the man or is he really here-_

_ Is _anything _really here: it's all stretch taffy in the sky and stretch taffy in her limbs, yielding and pulling and parting and is he really _here_- he can't be can he she lost him a long time ago-_

_ Real or imaginary she cannot hold onto him or this stretch taffy sky or these licorice-whip muscles without strength and falling is a long black tunnel she cannot claw her way free of-_

She surfaces.

She is _drowning_- cotton gauze in her nose and stuffed between her lips and soaking up moisture from her desert tongue; wasp-stinging steel between ropes of muscle fiber- she cannot _breathe_-

A cough and a gag and a twitch of her head over one side of the bed empties her meager intravenous diet onto the floor, and now out of the corner of one eye she sees a desk-hunched shadow become an old woman's crippled crepe paper version of upright, and three seconds later Dr. Kadowaki's gentle hand touches her damp lips.

She throws away the tissue she uses to dab vomit from Quistis' mouth into the red-lined can beside her bed- she has done this before, apparently- and from just beyond Quistis' peripheral vision, Ellen Kadowaki pulls up a stool she spreads herself across with a sigh.

"Where's Seifer?" is her first tired question.

"I kicked him out. He was hovering, and you were drifting in and out of consciousness too often to even really be aware of him. He's with Zell right now."

She closes her eyes and brings one hand to her forehead, and her headache is a vicious ceaseless pounding at her temples, like summer-storm waves assaulting children on a beach.

Her stomach is just as unsteady, and a light touch to the flat hunger-hollowed slope of it beneath medicinal-reeking sheets does nothing to compose it.

"You've been waking up long enough to throw up, and that's about it. How do you feel, beyond the nausea?"

"Headache," she croaks, shutting her eyes.

"Light sensitive?"

"Mm."

She can hear little thumping fists of raindrops on the window above her head and the minute hand in the clock ticking ticking ticking, and each soft grandfather click is a pin drop in this echoic empty-well silence strained as tight as it can go between them.

"I'd like to talk to him."

"He's helping out over in Balamb." Dr. Kadowaki snaps rubber at her wrists and bends down to scoop biohazard red from its little polished-steel receptacle, thoroughly splashed in clear-liquid vomit, and the clock ticks another tock and the raindrops beat another drum roll into this private pin-drop orchestra, and she opens her eyes to see the ceiling overhead.

She wonders how many times Seifer has counted these cracks with both arms behind his head and his soft blonde lashes flying half-mast, and she misses him so much it is a physical gnawing ache inside her, deeper than the hunger.

There is the scrape of a clipboard getting slid free of desk wood, a percussive tap tap tap of pencil wood on metal, joining this private pin-drop orchestra going on around her, a soft interlude of a throat clear, and then:

"I've been running some tests on you while you were sleeping. You should have come in for them weeks ago. Probably months."

Her bare toes curl beneath the covers and the hunger pangs are suddenly fingers that seize her by the throat and hold her suspended, swaying, and inside her chest her heart becomes ice, fire, ice again, because in this woman's voice is the dusty old sorrow of someone who has seen and felt and diagnosed it all, and now caring is something she tries to ration, because too much of it all at once will kill her.

She has woken up to be told she will be going back to sleep again soon.

Numb certainty is a layer of winter she cannot bake out of herself, even beneath all these mounds and folds and rolling hills of standard-issue wool. Furnace summers and sun steaming sweat from her shoulders and dead dangling carapaces of old burns swinging loose from her arms- this layer of winter melts before none of these images she conjures forth from her childhood-

She says nothing.

"I sent Seifer away so he wouldn't hear this." The percussive tap tap tap of pencil wood on metal hesitates, begins another tune. "He's almost broken my infirmary once already this week." Another hesitation, a shifting of soft rubber-soled feet that slides into the orchestra like the starting whisper of another layer, a deeper tone, and then: "I don't understand entirely what is happening to you, but the human body is not an infinite storage container, which I trust you found out the hard way, overstocking and overcasting last year. I told you then that you caused permanent damage that very well could have killed you, had you not been incredibly fortunate. You pushed your body past its natural limits; magic is a foreign entity as it is, which is why cadets are eased into junctioning with low level spells and strict casting restrictions. When you overstock, this causes wear and tear on an internal level that eventually builds up scar tissue, and, in more severe cases, can also result in changes on a molecular level, which is a whole open can of worms in and of itself. Think something along the lines of cancer: cancer metasizes when normal DNA damage that occurs in all of us is not taken care of by white cells, for one reason or another- poor immunity, life style choices such as smoking, exposure to toxins, extremely poor diet, etc. The precancerous cells, for one reason or another, do not self-destruct the way they are designed to once they become damaged, and continue to flourish and spread throughout the body. In severe cases of overcasting, damage to white cells can also occur; I took some blood while you were out, and your white cell count is extremely low. In Esthar last year, you came very close to dying- Rinoa's Cure spell was an emergency administration that kept you alive, although just barely, and simultaneously caused more damage.

I took several x-rays that show what appear to be tumors all over; an intravenous Curaga drip seems to have taken care of most of them- for whatever reason, your body doesn't react to the magic when administered in this way, perhaps because of the processing it's undergone- but most of your internal organs show signs of scarring, and further bloodwork shows what I can best describe as an allergy to any type of magic in its pure casting format."

"Isn't patient permission required to perform these kinds of tests?" she asks stiffly.

"Not when you are government property, Quistis, and the tests are considered necessary to the continued functioning of the property in question." The softness in her voice cushions this statement.

She already knows this, of course: she signed away her rights a long time ago, on a little blue-dotted line in perfectly back-slanted letters that did not waver or sag down at the corners or smear together into black-ink illegibility, the way Seifer's chicken scratch scrawl always had the tendency to, she _knows _this-

But it is still a stinging little slap to the face, after all this time, to be just another slab of meat struggling to justify its funding.

"Are you saying I have cancer?"

"I don't think the tumors were actually malignant- not in that sense, at least. At first I wasn't even sure what they were comprised of, but- and here's the truly odd thing- I did a scan of one, and it exhibited properties I've never before seen in that kind of growth."

"What do you mean?"

"First of all, do you understand what a Guardian Force truly is? Garden's education on the matter leaves something to be desired- it is explained how to junction them, how to strategically select the best GF for battle, depending upon the enemy being faced, but just what exactly a GF _is _does not seem to be terribly common knowledge among cadets and even full-fledged SeeDs."

"An independent energy force. When combined with a human being, it loses its solid form and can only manifest in a limited fashion, the duration of which is determined by the skill and strength of the human junctioned to it. They greatly enhance a user's natural abilities and spell repertoire, although they can be overwhelming to cadets still on casting restrictions, who do not have a good grasp on casting and the effects of overdoing it. No one is precisely sure of their origin," Quistis recites.

"Correct. This 'independent energy force' that makes up the GF is what those tumors were comprised of, Quistis."

Her head twists around so quickly she is almost astonished it does not pop off the base of her spine, and an unwavering stare does not change the look in the doctor's eyes or the rumpled purse of her lips. "What does that mean?"

"I've been doing some research into this the past several weeks, trying to figure out what's happened to Ellone, how it's connected to the sorceresses, how to stop it, etc. It took a lot of digging, but I found evidence that this 'independent energy force' you mentioned is also connected to the sorceresses, that they themselves are partially comprised of it, which is what makes them so incomprehensibly powerful. The last book I was reading on the subject theorized that Guardian Forces and sorceresses were related/connected in some manner back in ancient times, although current manifestations of the succession do not seem to have much to do with them anymore. Like anything, it's possible they have evolved, and that they themselves are no longer exactly sure of their origin- just like us simple little humans."

A slow shake of her head and a squeeze of her eyes does not assemble any of this into something that is even vaguely comprehensible, and on top of these blankets that mound themselves into furnace-summer piles across her thighs her hands ball themselves into little sweat-slick fists, and she unfurls one to grope for the glasses that no longer straddle her nose-

And her hand skims fever-sweat and eyebrows that carve shallow ripples of thought-line elevens into the space between her brows, and she wants Seifer.

She has not seen him in weeks, and she _needs _him, and she knows this is childish of her, this is unbearably _weak_, but she needs a prop, a spine that has not bent itself into hot-steel lace re-forged too many times, feathering weakly around the edges.

She is just so very _tired_.

"I still don't understand."

"Whether she intended to or not, Rinoa attempted to pass the succession along to you with that final spell. Your body has programmed itself to identify magic as an allergen and therefore blocked most of it, although thankfully enough of the spell got through to keep you alive long enough to get you to a hospital. Your white cell count is low because it's working overtime every time you encounter magic, which is why you've been feeling sick and weak lately when in its presence. I'm sure you already know this, but a low white cell count puts your immune system at risk, which, in addition to other, more serious issues, also leaves you open to more common ailments like cold and flus."

She has gone cold to the bone again beneath her covers, and she crowds them up around her chest and leans over her knees like she is again contemplating that red-plastic waste bin sitting to one side of her bed, and dread makes her heart into a cold dead star adrift in empty black galaxy. "Then does this mean…I'm one of them?"

"Not in the way you're thinking, no. You still won't be able to use magic. You can't channel it, and obviously you still cannot even tolerate others around you casting it, but on an internal, molecular level? You are, a little bit. Rinoa obviously did not pass the succession on, but she may have passed a few small abilities on. From what I understand, you're somewhat of a conduit, at this point. You're attached to that power source, whatever it may be, that makes the sorceresses what they are, but it's not accessible to you." She makes a note on her clipboard and spends a long time tilting her head this way and that, as though it is all chicken-scratch scrawl she cannot quite stitch together into something cohesive. "Quistis, Ellone was hearing voices when I was keeping her under observation, specifically Rinoa's. Has anything like that happened to you?"

Reluctance stalls her tongue for just a moment. "Yes."

"I don't yet understand why she can communicate with Ellone, although a connection to you certainly makes some sense finally, after all my reading. Ellone's abilities are the first of their kind, as far as I can tell; there seems to be no precedent for them, at least not that anyone ever discovered. It's possible there were more like her that the sorceresses never found."

The unpeeling of her tongue from the roof of her mouth is a painful honey-adhesive parting that jerks the muscle into place against her bottom teeth, and this painful honey-adhesive parting drips syrup into paste-puddles of silence that glue together her teeth and tongue and tube-scratched throat.

"I know it's a lot to take in. I don't yet understand all of it myself. But that's the basics, and it's an answer, at least, when before we were pretty much stumped. It's up to you who you want to make this information known to. I would suggest keeping it as quiet as possible. There's a chance, albeit an extremely small one, from everything I know, that if…if Rinoa dies, the succession may continue on through you, since you would then be the closest 'relation' for lack of a better term. This second attempt would most likely kill you. The chance that it would succeed- considering your body's reaction to anything magical in nature, at this point in time- is infinitesimal"

She lets the silence percolate in her heart and stuff her brain full of roaring white noise fuzz, and she does not look up from her hands folded now across these furnace-summer piles of blanket on her thighs.

"Killing Rinoa might kill me as well, then."

"Yes. Unlikely, but you need to be aware of it. Once general clean-up has been completed in Balamb, Squall's sending out a unit to look for Ellone and Rinoa. He doesn't have any other choice."

The ticking of the clock is so very, very loud: tock tock tock tock, sand hours between her fingers.

"No. He doesn't."

And there is nothing more to say.

* * *

><p>The phone in the front pocket of his soot-smeared pants sends wasp feedback down his whole leg.<p>

He slaps it to his ear and barks a "Yeah?" that is as brusque as he can make it, his eyes on a sky running yellow; the sun has broken open like yolk and leaked itself across gray-autumn clouds, and in the September breeze that pulls rust from the trees and ash from the ground, he can feel a faint fading touch of summer, and he pretends it smells of sea-salt wind and not charcoal death.

"It's me."

It is like something unfreezes inside of him with this small simple statement, this tired old voice that does not sound like hers, and he grips the phone to his ear until it creaks like his geriatric soldier's bones in his numb sagging body and stirs the ash at his feet and his shovel between the fingers of his free hand, and when he is ready to answer her at last, what comes out is not even close to what he wants to tell her.

"You're awake."

"Yes. How is Zell doing?"

Across the town square from him is an asshole getting color pinched into his cheeks and tears squeezed out of his eyes, and up goes one domestically roughened hand to wipe the confetti bones of her neighbors from drooping blonde spikes, and he is so fucking glad his stoppered heart shakes loose its plug just a little, and now his voice is only a tight little knot in his throat, thick as clot. "He found his mom. Turns out she was visiting a friend when the shit hit the fan. They were down in her basement canning peaches or some shit like that- whatever it is old bats do when they get together."

"Seifer," she scolds out of habit, but he can tell her heart's not in it.

"Someone dug them out about twenty minutes ago and the first thing she did was come running to find Wuss. Goddamned dog showed up too."

"Good. I'm glad…I'm glad he found her."

He leans his left elbow down on his shovel and blinks down at his scarred hand, blotched black, and between them is a silence full of all the things he wants to tell her and can't, because it was bad enough having to break the news to Wuss with his heart in his fucking eyes, and he can't say it anyway, please don't fucking _make _him-

He shuts his eyes. "Quistis…you've been out of it for a long time, so there's…there's some shit you don't know." He squeezes his eyes more tightly, and behind his lids blossom white shapes inside black, and for just a moment he remembers summer rockets in a childhood sky. "Fuck. I don't-"

He doesn't know how to say it.

Irvine is dead.

Three words, and he cannot say them: three words that sit on his tongue like these confetti bones of dead fishermen and oven-baked children; that's what they taste like, fucking _exactly _what they taste like, and he would know.

No one ever tells you when you sign up for the job what dead people taste like, or that you'll ever even have reason to know. Thing is, pulling the trigger, thrusting the knife- any way you wanna' do it, it all creates a big fucking mess in the end, and there goes some guy's blood or guts or bones across your lips, tangling up in your hair, hot metal in your mouth every time you open it to yell, and after a while you get used to some mission's sweet-salt blood on your tongue, but the thing you never really get over is trying not to lick away your friend's, and that's what they _really _don't fucking prepare you for. That's one you just have to bend over and take all on your own one day: down rag dolls Johnny into your arms and up across your lips splashes his hot-steel blood, and try to get _that _taste out of your mouth, with enough mouthwash to scorch every fucking taste bud from your tongue.

"Irvine," she says with no inflection in her voice.

"Yeah. It's…he's…"

"I know," she whispers, and right now she is Ice Queen Instructor Trepe with winter in her voice but it is an act he can hear coming apart at the seams, and he is so fucking sorry he was not there when she found out he can't even tell her. "I heard…I overheard Dr. Kadowaki discussing the funeral with someone."

"Thursday."

"I know." She clears her throat as fall chill steals the breath from his, and he wrenches open his eyes to watch his exhales become cirriform spirals in the sky. "Am I…am I going to see you sometime soon? Dr. Kadowaki thinks I'm past the worst of it now. I should be a slightly more interesting conversationalist."

She is trying so fucking _hard_ to maintain her rigid immovable control.

"I'll see you in five, Trepe," he says, and over the line he can hear her swallow, and this small broken sound goes right through him, because what she is swallowing is the same thing he has been fucking choking on since Irvine Kinneas' hand went limp on his head and slipped down the back of his neck to bounce off the collar of his coat.

When he hangs up the phone, Squall is staring at him.

"I need to talk to you. About…about Rinoa." His bruised eyes in his white-talcum face shut gently, and a knuckle to each eye clears the death grit from his lashes and rains little black crumbs of it down onto the ground between them. "I'm sending a team out after Ellone and Rinoa, as soon as we can spare enough people. I need to know everything you do, anything that could help us find them."

Seifer shifts his shovel in the kiln-thawed bones of the fishermen and the children beneath him. "Fucking now?"

Squall's bruised eyes in his white-talcum face draw into slits, and it is a long moment before he can say anything. Seifer watches him pull whatever it is up out of his chest like he is overhanding a fucking climbing rope, one black-taped progress knot at a time. "No. Not now. Later. After…" He puts both hands in his pockets and squints down at his feet, and the ironic goddamned thing about it is just how well they fucking understand one another, sometimes.

"Then I'll see you after," he says, and up goes his shovel across one shoulder.

He is goddamned tired after all, if there is no smoke in his heart left behind for this man.

* * *

><p>Soft autumn rain runs down his face and into his mouth and melts the flowers in his hands into pale marshmallow sponge, and what does not make any sense to Seifer is where the fuck is his <em>hat<em>?

Beside him Wuss leans on Quistis and Quistis leans on the ramrod that is her backbone, and the sand beneath his feet turns to marsh, and he has no one to lean on at all.

He stares.

Irvine's cheeks are pink just like he fucking thought they'd be, and maybe the asshole leaned to the suspicious side of pretty, but not _that _fucking much, and who the hell do they hire anyway, to do this to cold pale corpses in their bags, wearing cosmetics like wax dummies in storefronts-

Wuss is wiping his eyes again.

The rain is in his too, but he does not bother to lift his arm, because beside him are Quistis and her ramrod spine and he doesn't want her getting the wrong fucking idea or anything.

This man in this box was once a boy, and the preacher droning on in the background does not know this- very few people know this, because once you cross that threshold into adulthood suddenly lemon ice shavings in wax paper cups and ant hills kicked into tiny scurrying sparks of flame in the dark and bedtime stories read by flashlight are taken away, and suddenly you are left only with whatever role maturity has molded you into. And so this man in this box who was once a boy is now only a soldier, to most of this crowd gathered around him with heads bowed and saltwater teardrops on noses, but he remembers missing baby teeth and crabs commandeered from tide pools and pillow fights after bedtime-

And he misses the boy who was not a soldier, who was only a boy with caverns between his teeth and dandelions in his hands.

He stands in rain-softened marsh that sucks at his boots and drains deadness from his heart, and he watches his friend's earring glint silver in the rain and flare yellow in the fingers of sunlight that make their way through slits in the clouds, and beside him Wuss leans harder on Quistis and she leans harder on the ramrod that is her backbone, and he leans on nothing.

* * *

><p>He stands.<p>

His father touches his arm and flicks little anxious glances toward Kiros flanking his right, and he stands.

He goes on standing.

His friend is sealed carefully away in his permanent silk-pillowed bed with rain on his face and marshmallow sponge between his hands, and tiny heartbeats of dirt tap tap tap on hollow oak-wood lid-

And he stands.

* * *

><p>Summer is one long blur of jumbo candy sticks in peppermint-glued hands and lemonade on the porch and getting kicked in the sack by Quistis, because he forgot about that fucking line of hers and toed one foot too far over it-<p>

But autumn has burned the summer from this sky and the cherries in his cheeks are artificial F&D red no. 6 now, and you know, they used to be just stains put there by exertion or wind or sun, and he is never going to have another summer again, and that doesn't seem very fucking _fair_, does it, when if any of them deserved to be happy it was him, it was fucking _him_-

The beach clears.

He is left with Squall and a brief burst of sun and a fresh dirt mound between them.

* * *

><p>He stands.<p>

His father leaves with a touch on his elbow and a brief "I'll be inside with Cid if you need me," and across the beach is Seifer with both hands in his pockets and his head down in the rain, and he just goes on _standing_.

If Irvine found his way back to her, if he is happy, if they are _together_, he can live with this.

He looks at the new earthworm hill between them and the flat flower-strewn one beside it and the man across from him in a coat the color of the sky, and he stands.

He stands.

He stands.

He stands.

He _stands_.

_He stands_.

He does not know what else he can do.

* * *

><p>She is upstairs sitting on Irvine's childhood bed with both hands folded in her lap, eyes closed, and he stands in the doorway for a moment watching her, and there is a burning in his heart and his throat and his eyes, and it's always the first step that's the hardest, you know?<p>

His eyes are dry as he leans against the door. They have _been _dry through all these endless minutes and seconds and hours of ceremony that don't mean a fucking thing to him, because what comfort is it to him, that some asshole stumbled his way into the wrong profession and never floundered his way back out, what does he fucking _care _about this _better place _that's waiting for his friend- got any proof it exists, preacher, _shitstain_-

They are still dry when he takes this first step forward, and the second.

That's what makes it such a goddamned surprise that he's already bawling by the time he sinks to his knees in front of her, his head coming down on her lap, and he can't _stop_, he can't even attempt to fucking stop, so he just fucking kneels here twisting fistfuls of her uniform pants into loops between his fingers, emptying out everything that is inside of him.

She puts her hand on his head and her own tears in his hair, and he lets his shoulders go on shaking and shaking and fucking _shaking_, and her arms loop themselves around his neck and he feels her cheek settle itself against the top of his head, and for a long time they are locked together like this, just holding on.

It's been too goddamned long anyway, and he's missed her, he's missed her so fucking much she will never even know, and losing them both- he can't even think about it, he _won't _even fucking think about it, because she's here, she is in his fucking _arms_, and as long as he has this he can keep going.

Not right now, with his legs cramped into slabs of dead meat underneath him and his head steel anchor weight in her lap, but later, one minute or hour or day, he will peel himself free and hold her instead of the other way around, if that's what she needs, and his eyes will be little dry-desert scabs in his face, completely empty.

But for now…for now he kneels with his hands in fists on his thighs and his face plastered cheek-down against her pants, and he remembers a little boy with brownies in his cheeks and firecrackers in his hands, and he sobs until his mouth is all arid desert wasteland going on forever and his eyes and lips are pasted shut with snot and tears and whatever else it is that comes out of him, and she just goes on and on and fucking on holding him, stroking his hair.

* * *

><p>The door creaks like his knees, popping themselves into reluctantly clicking upright, and he freezes in the frame with the children clustered silently behind him, staring between and around his legs into the room beyond.<p>

Irvine's old bed is the quilt-covered one in the far corner, and on it are huddled his once upon a time children, his son and daughter with the soldier's eyes and the mechanical hearts, wound up like clocks, counting down on the timer he set for them years ago when he condemned them to this life of losing friends and forgoing souls and dying too young.

They are pressed cheek to cheek, crescent moon lashes under their eyes and both arms tangled around the other, and there is a hot wet prickling in his throat that spreads down into his chest, and now he silently shuts the door with a soft hack of a throat clear. "Come on."

"Cid? How come Uncle Seifer and Aunt Qisty are in Devon's bed?"

He shuts his eyes for just a moment, and works two fingers under the frame of his glasses.

"Cid?"

"We're going to have a slumber party in the living room tonight, all right? It'll be fun. Everybody go get the extra pillows and blankets from the cupboard in the hallway."

The children scatter.

He spends a long time staring at this shut door with his hands in fists along his sides, and it is not until thundering footsteps on the stairs pull him out of his reverie that he wipes his eyes and steps out into the hallway without looking back.

He walks step by step by step down the staircase, and each is nearly a fall, a faltering, and he presses his hand to his chest as he goes, and he thinks about how very, very old he is, and how much more of this he is going to be able to bear.

* * *

><p>She stirs in his arms and rolls over onto one side, and he scrapes loose strands of blonde back from her eyes and brushes his fingertips down the bridge of her nose, all the way down to her lips.<p>

She says nothing.

The window above their heads spreads star-stain across the quilt bunched up between them, and he loops one arm tighter around her waist, making of the space between them a narrow little sliver of a thing, painted pearl.

The moon in the sky slips behind autumn-night clouds and now that little sliver of pearl becomes contusion-colored splinter, layering shadow over the curve of hip and dip of waist.

"Trepe. You awake?" he whispers.

She says nothing.

He kisses the soft arc of her shoulder where it tapers up into her neck and lays his head back down beside hers.

She lies beside him with her eyes open and her lips shut, and there is so much he could fucking say right now that it all coils and knots up inside of him, burning like his friend's boots on crisp autumn-stiff grass-

And he squeezes shut his eyes until this image is gone, until Irvine Kinneas is once more just a lazy smile underneath back-tipped hat brim because he is not _thinking about any of this shit right now_-

Three serrated inhalations slow his heart in his chest, and a ragged cough finds his voice and jerks it roughly over his tongue: "Squall's sending out a team as soon as he can get enough people together for it." He presses his nose into the side of her neck, breathing the soap-scent of her skin and the artificial cherry bouquet of her hair, and the thought of leaving her now, when he needs her, when she needs _him_, is a gut blow that prickles and rankles and festers, and he can barely even fucking go on. "I'm going with them."

He pauses for reaction, and there is only the soft slide of blue eyes beneath perfectly centered glasses, a faint hiss of aromatic lemon air through lips flavored ripe-raspberry red, and she says nothing.

"He's not…he's not supposed to be in a fucking _hole_. I should have killed the bitch when I had the chance: it's not like I wasn't right fucking there. It's not like I couldn't have, if I'd really fucking _tried_-" He pauses again, because each word is a little fucking knife in his heart, and he wishes she could _understand_, without all these heinous fucking cocksucker _words_-

He fucking _hurts _and it might be his own fault- it might be his fault that she is a cold silent pile in his arms and Irvine is a cold silent pile underneath layers of moist new earthworm dirt, and what does he need to say to make it better, what does he need to _do_, and does she fucking blame him too- please fucking Hyne say she forgives him-

She says nothing.

He lays beneath cool autumn moonlight listening to her breathe.

"I won't come back until it's over." A little scorn in his voice is the only thing that keeps it from breaking now. "Because let's face it: Puberty Boy isn't going to take care of business." He's one to talk: if it were Quistis scorching Balamb into folding hills of ash like feathers on the wind, he'd fight to the last fucking miniscule breath in his chest any asshole that tried to hurt her, which of course is the difference between him and Squall Leonhart. Pubes knows his duty. Maybe he can't land the blow himself, but he'll sure as fuck order it thrown.

And Ellone is out there all alone, and Wuss has got the most pathetic sad face he has ever seen, like a fucking puppy banished to the corner, and Sis is coming home to him alive, if it's the last goddamned thing he ever does.

"Seifer." His name is a sigh, a breath, and now his stomach bottoms out and plasters itself flat somewhere near his feet, and everything he planned on following up with hangs up in his throat and sticks to his tongue.

She breathes quietly in his arms and aims her flat marble-glass eyes at baseball-dented divots of ceiling panel above them, and he waits.

He waits.

The clouds smother the moon and paint ink into her hair and her flat marble-glass eyes, and still he waits.

"Just…don't say anything right now," she whispers. "I'll…I'll deal with it in the morning."

"I'll come back," he promises thickly.

She says nothing.

He holds her closer.

"I'll accept whatever you have to do…in the morning. But for now, just…_please_."

She closes her eyes.

He says nothing.

* * *

><p>He presses 'play.'<p>

The VCR whirs and clunks and across the screen inch flakes of snow that become marble-green iris and from there rattle and shimmer into uniformed partygoers-

And into the frame slides Irvine Kinneas, nodding his head and flaring out his coat as he pirouettes a smile out of Quistis Trepe, and across the floor ripple dark humps of bodies half-stirring in their sleep, and he lets the video play on.

Cid has not looked so young in a very long time.

He leans forward with his elbows on his knees and the remote in his hand and warm tears like graveside rain in his eyes, and off sweeps the hat-

And the burning in his heart and his throat paint fever into his cheeks, and he brings one fist up to his mouth.

Patchy snow smears the quality into classical black and white, and then resolves into Selphie Tilmitt waving cheerfully, hat on her head and perky smile on her lips. Beside her Quistis poses uncomfortably, smiling shyly, and the remote in his trembling hand slaps itself against the couch, once, twice, again.

The dark humps of bodies half-stirring in their sleep go still.

Through night-shadowed knots of sleeping children slips Squall with his son in his arms.

Zell wipes his eyes.

"I just wanted to see us all together again," he whispers.

They sit together in the dark watching ghosts set to mute, and it is not until sunrise stains the sky red-cherry and orange inferno that the VCR whirs its final whir and the tape clicks its last revolution and on the screen is now black eternity, and this time he does not hit rewind.

* * *

><p>Roaringtumbling/rushing-

Nuclear white/pitch dark/watery gray-blue inbetween-

He is spit out the other end.

There is burning in his lungs and smoke in his eyes and gentle hands beneath his head, scarred with callus, and fresh rain-scent in this white-nuclear glow he has landed in sucks this all away and now he can breathe; he can see; he is _standing_-

He is alone.

Eternal white nothing stretches out and out and out beneath his burn-blemished soldier's boots, and he turns, once, again, and behind him is black-bruised infinity-

And another revolution whirls him back around toward white fog, and in this fog materializes something yellow as the sun-

He shuts his eyes.

Behind his lids burn red afterimages of summer-cloud mist and midnight sky without stars and the hope in his heart squeezes it into a thin wrinkled lump of a thing-

He peeks.

He blinks.

Waiting for him are her morning sunshine smile and his hat on her head, and inside his chest his heart is compressed into powder, into dust that clogs up his throat and smolders in his tear ducts-

And he smiles.

He goes on smiling for a very long time.

He bows.

She tips his hat in acknowledgement.

He keeps the arch in his spine and the hinge in his waist until there is no more powder in his chest or dust in his throat, and he straightens with a wink he has saved just for her.

She holds out her hand.

Barren white forever glitters all around him like a star, like the summer-furnace nucleus of the sun, and still it cannot outshine her.

He knits his fingers through hers, and his first fumbling step forward is half fall: she yanks on his hand just the way he remembers, his hat tilting and bouncing and sliding into awkwardly-angled half-cock-

She pulls him forward, forward, farther, farther, smiling over her shoulder at him, tugging him along behind her into all that white-

They are swallowed.


	27. Chapter Fourteen

**A/N: Ok, so here's the deal with this fic: I am just about finished with the epilogue, minus one last teeny little scene. I'm off work all next week, so I intend to finish up the epilogue, do some editing on the last few chapters, and then spam the crap out of the site so that I can get this all wrapped up both for me and you guys. Then it's on to my little novelization project (and by little I mean fucking huge, because I don't think there's any way you can really do justice to a Final Fantasy game with a little 100 page novella), which will go up I don't know exactly when. I finally got the prologue figured out tonight, though, so I'll probably put that up sometime soon as a tease.**

**As always, thank you so much for your reviews, and thank you also for not Googling my address and showing up on my doorstep to shove pointy objects into all the yieldy (this is my author's note; I can make up words if I want) parts of me after what I did to poor Irvine.**

**Chapter Fourteen**

Balamb Garden

Balamb

One Week Later

His spoon clicked inside his coffee cup.

Dim opals of hazy emergency light eyes flickered drowsily up at him from his mug, and slithered across the table into the shower-wet ropes of Quistis' hair.

He set aside his spoon.

He watched little white constellations of sugar granules slip down through layers of black.

"No."

He did not look up.

"You got any better ideas, Puberty Boy?"

"Seifer." A little warning pressure in her voice pulled Seifer's head up with a scowl, and he shifted his ass in its seat and his boots on the table, and now staring became a contest between them, her eyes behind perfectly-arranged glasses pinching themselves into narrow blue slits.

"We don't even know where they are," Squall pointed out tiredly.

"We will eventually. And you can't just go in guns fucking blazing."

"That's an odd sentiment, coming from you," Quistis said dryly.

He ignored her. "She fucking _obliterated _Balamb without even blinking. She killed her own dad and his entire fucking staff with a couple flicks of her wrist. We don't know what the fuck she's capable of, what Odine did to her, what she's planning or where she is. So we send me in first. Ship the fucking SeeD team out with me- I don't care. But I go in first, get her to believe you assholes captured me against my will, pledge my undying devotion to her, what the fuck ever." He flipped one hand nonchalantly through the air, and beside him Quistis pinched the bridge of her nose, briefly shutting both eyes. "And then I get to Ellone, get her out of there, and we bring that cunt down."

A little hot red fist closed over his heart like a vise and spread sweet-salt blood through his mouth, and his ragged raw-meat tongue unglued itself from adhesive saliva and moved without caution or premeditation, and he saw Quistis press her lips together and knife Seifer with another look.

"She's not a _cunt_."

A tip and a tilt and forward went his chair and down went his head and now eye to eye they sat, fire in Squall's heart and ice in Seifer's voice, and he flicked a hand back toward his hip and the weapon slanted crosswise over it.

"She's not Rinoa, you dumbfuck. You have to understand that. She fucking _blew up Balamb_. Because we _hurt her feelings_. Because she felt alone. She _killed Irvine_. She's not your giggly little Princess Fucktoy anymore, Squall."

And the fire in his heart seized him by the throat and now his hands molded themselves into hard scar tissue balls he lunged forward to pound into this sneering asshole's face-

And away from the table squealed Seifer's chair and down came a nonchalant slap of a block that spun out of range his desk-velvet punch-

"_Stop it_," Quistis snapped. "Both of you, sit down."

He did not.

He folded both hands into fists as Seifer cracked his knuckles, his wolf's smile on his face and no emotion in his eyes, and now suddenly Quistis' hand materialized at Seifer's collar, yanking him back; a heavily-muscled shrug flipped it loosely away again, and he leaned forward with another sneer, pressing both hands into the cafeteria table beneath him. "Matron turned into the same thing with Ultimecia riding her like a whore: she was a cunt. A manipulative piece of shit bitch. She didn't give a shit about anyone except herself, and neither does Rinoa, not anymore. You think we're going to show up, fight her, shove the bitch through Time Compression until she comes out the other end normal? Think she's going to sit on your fucking dick again, twirling her hair and lying to you about the size of the pathetic limp tree twig between your legs? She's not. But, wait, you've got someone else in mind for that already, isn't that fucking right? Out of sight, out of mind- out with the old poon, in with the fucking new-"

A right hook Squall threw with his whole body behind the strike sat Seifer down hard on his ass, and dental mold wedges of red opened like smiles across his knuckles, and a shake of his heat-stinging hand and a toss of the hair straggling down into his eyes, and Seifer was on him.

He'd forgotten how damn strong the guy was.

A viper strike of a rising block detoured the first punch from his jaw and an instinctive downward flinch just barely hooked away the knee he only just deflected into the side of his thigh, and now up swept one hand he didn't stop in time, and around his throat closed white bands of finger that squeezed from his throat all the whistling blood-moist strands of his air-

"Get _off _him, Seifer."

He hooked a thumb toward Seifer's left eye socket, and only a last second recoil whipped his head out of the way in time.

"_Seifer_!"

Fear in her voice and black stars in his eyes, and this crazy asshole was _killing _him-

He stiffened his fingers and fired from the hip, and this callus-thickened knife hand slanted off Seifer's solar plexus hard enough to punch the breath from his lungs and loosen those white bands of finger from Squall's throat, and a folding at the waist put them forehead to forehead, scar to scar, and now another spear jab popped Seifer's grip free at last and wiped the stars from his eyes-

And a peripheral blur of a backfist slammed him wheezing to his knees, one arm up in front of his face.

Too many hours behind his desk and not enough in the training center, and he was going to pay for it right here, right now-

An arc of round kick going straight for his temple, and a twist and a downward slash with that upraised arm and now that kick became a stagger, and he threw all of his weight forward into the side of Seifer's knee, shoulder first.

He heard a chair hit the floor with a gunshot bang and Quistis' voice in the background, crawling its way through the thundering blood-tide in his ears and the smoke in his heart, and he didn't care, he didn't give two _shits_ because it was time someone taught this _prick _a lesson-

* * *

><p>He wrapped Pubes like a wrestler as he fell.<p>

Lock on the legs and straight right to the chin, and see if the fucking shithole didn't regret throwing his fucking hat into the ring when he was through with him: stick your fingers in the goddamned Torama's mouth and don't come crying to him when your fag-ass little desk worker hand gets taken off at the wrist.

He punched Squall in the mouth; once, twice, again, more as a distraction than anything, because you don't blow stamina on a face shot unless your opponent's got a glass jaw, and a two-handed clap to Pubes' ears spun disorientation through his eyes and a seizure tremor down his forearms, and now the fingers on his right wrist wrenched themselves free and slid out of range, which was too fucking bad because he would have liked to break every single goddamned one of them.

Puberty Boy hadn't been fucked in a while? Let him help with that: five blood-spurting nubs right up the queer's fucking _twat_ and Seifer's teeth in his throat, just in case a little kink was his thing.

A one-handed yank on his hair hard enough to pull several of the fuckers from their roots brought him cursing to his feet, and he spun out with an elbow he stopped half an inch shy of landing the blow, and over the rigid-cable muscles in his forearms peered Quistis' coldly disapproving face, pinched white around the lips.

A nimble flick of her wrist brought his eyes down the curve of her hip to the model-length line of her leg, and along that model-length line unraveled her whip, click click clicking against the floor beneath his feet.

Across from him, Pubes spat blood and wiped his mouth.

He hadn't bothered to dab away the moisture from his own: smear it across your teeth like you're enjoying the flavor, let it stay brown-rust flakes of paint-peeling reminder that you're one sick motherfucker, and suddenly you've got upperclassmen avoiding you in the halls and the world at your goddamned feet, neck bent, and it was time Pubes remembered just who the fuck he was dealing with anyway.

"Both of you, step away from each other."

Seifer cracked his neck and from there moved on to his knuckles; one sick wet bone-pop at a time, little staccato bursts one after another after another. He watched Pubes' beady eyes flare the same nuclear hatred that warmed his fucking chest, eating through all the layers of ice into his anesthetized heart, and only another warning flick of that rattlesnake coil along her right hip kept him where he was.

She'd use it on his fucking balls if he wasn't careful.

"We are done here." Hard pressure on each individual word told him she meant business, if the weapon in her hand wasn't already indication enough of that, and he folded both arms across his chest and leaned the side of his hip into the crooked cafeteria table to his left, and maybe she'd go straight for his balls, but there was that sullen robot emotwat of a face right across from him, just waiting to be pounded into splinters of bone and butcher's slabs of raw-ground meat.

Couldn't blame a guy for still thinking about it.

Squall walked off without a word.

The door slammed behind him.

Quistis silently coiled up her whip into a smoothly-oiled bundle on her belt, and did not look at him. "That was helpful, Seifer."

"Yeah, I figured you were just as sick of looking at his face as I was. Got rid of him, didn't I?"

She flicked her eyes up to his at last, and all that world-ending anger just leaked right the fuck out of him, and suddenly he was just so goddamned _tired_.

He hated it when she looked at him like that. Like he was the biggest fucking disappointment of her whole life, like she had just stepped in him and now could not get him off her fucking shoe and he was fucking _trying _here, but Irvine was a goddamned hole in the ground beside his mother and now leaning against the living room wall in Wuss' too-empty house was a rifle that would never again be used, and he didn't know where to _put _any of this shit-

"You didn't have to be such an asshole. He lost someone he loved too. He's about to lose another," she said crisply, and spun on her heel to leave him standing there with both hands slack at his sides and his throat tight around his apology.

A snarled "_Fuck_!" and a spin and up arced one steel-toed boot, and the upended chair at his feet skipped across the floor like a pebble over water.

* * *

><p>"Aren't there times when you want to share your feelings with someone?"<p>

He tightened his fingers on the cool-ice railing in front of him, and said nothing.

She stepped up beside him to lean one meticulously-pleated uniform sleeve down along the railing next to him, and over the slope of her shoulder he watched Balamb add to the autumn wind soft black flakes like stars, taking wing into white-salt clouds.

"Do you remember the last time we were here, when I said that to you?"

The soft black flakes like stars swirled away on updrafts and came back down on gusts, all tobacco and charred-meat stink in the wind- _he will never again take a breath without inhaling sweet-sour death_- and he swept one hand self-consciously up toward his neck, burrowing into the skin there.

Cinnamon fall shook itself into a layer of rust on the ground, and he wiped away dust the same color from beneath his nose, and he did not look at her.

"Squall," Quistis said gently. She touched his arm. "When I first said that to you years ago, it wasn't a critique, or teasing, or even a suggestion: it was an invitation. That's all it is now. You can't go on forever, pretending you're fine."

He opened his mouth, choked, swallowed, tried again.

He squeezed his eyes shut.

She touched his arm again and kept her hand there this time, and what he wouldn't give, to go on standing here with these gentle fingers on his arm and soft sighs of peppermint-gum breath in his face: up here there was only Quistis Trepe and Squall Leonhart, and if he pressed himself back from this railing with the bird's eye view of Balamb rippled into black-scorched folds of hills, if he made himself into a small fetal huddle on the echoing slat metal beneath his feet-

He'd have only her and him and all the things he couldn't say; no more death scent in the wind or layers of red-rust carpet on the ground or black feathers among white-salt clouds, and for just a moment the possibility overcame him, _strangled _him, and he swung one foot back into the first step of his retreat.

"Squall."

He turned away from the railing.

Her hand slid free of his arm.

"Squall, please."

He walked himself three steps out of her range, stopped, coiled both fists up at his sides, breathed softly through his nose and into his mouth, and he did not open his eyes.

"I don't know if I can do it," he said at last, and moist heat prickled in his eyes and earthquake tremors rattled in his voice, and he could not take another step.

"I know," she whispered. "But she…she wouldn't want to…she _doesn't _want to…" Quistis trailed off.

Her footsteps clattered on the slat metal beneath his feet and the reek of burning things in the wind jabbed his eyes and inserted itself like a needle into his sinuses, and he wiped his nose again.

Behind his eyelids bloomed white-wax figurines of unmoving dolls in their boxes and he blinked again, _again_, and how could he add her to that growing collection of white-moon headstones in beach sand, _how was he supposed to do that_, how could he even _think _about it, when they had already lost so much-

"Squall." His name came out a sigh, a gentle admonition that scraped itself like fingernails down his spine and raised the feather down on his arms. "You don't have to be involved, if it's too hard. I'll direct the SeeD unit."

"You could just kill her, Quistis?" he whispered, winching his eyes down tighter, tighter, _tighter_.

"Not before. But now? Yes."

"Because of Irvine?" His voice faltered so much he had to lower his mouth to his fist and cough loose all the gravel stuck in his throat, and still he did not turn around to face her.

"No. When I was unconscious in the infirmary…I saw her. Dr. Kadowaki ran several tests on me, in an effort to find out why I was having such a strong reaction to any sort of exposure to magic, and there's some kind of connection between the two of us. She can explain it better than I can. But while I was in a coma, Rinoa…visited me, I suppose you could say. I don't think it was entirely on purpose, but she was able to contact me somehow." She paused, and he listened to the rustle of her clothing as she rearranged both arms across her chest. "She doesn't want to live like this, Squall. Part of her is aware of what's going on, what she's doing, but only dimly. Just enough to feel the horror of what she's become, without any ability to stop it. We're the only ones that can do that for her."

The moist heat in his eyes became acid streaks down either side of his nose. "She's trapped."

"Yes. Just like Matron was. Seifer was cruel in the way he went about it, but he wasn't wrong. The kindest thing to do for her now is to end her suffering. The part of her that is still Rinoa will understand, Squall. She'll forgive you."

He felt his shoulders twitch, cramp, round themselves up toward his ears, and behind him her footsteps on the slat metal floor beneath him resumed, tap tap tapping their way across the scant millimeter space left between them.

"I know she'll forgive me," he whispered, keeping his hands in fists at his sides, his voice cracking, hiccupping, fumbling. "But how…how do I…how do I forgive myself?"

The acid streaks down either side of his nose reached his lips and now in his mouth warm salt stirred itself into parched blood, and he swallowed, coughed, raised one of those fists to his lips, and he couldn't…he couldn't even-

He opened his eyes, shut them tightly again.

White-wax figurines and children's candy-breath sighs in salt wind, and what the hell _happened _to them all, those orphans exhaling sticky-sweet clouds into the sky-

"I'm not- I can't- I don't-"

She pressed her cheek against the nape of his neck, soft vanilla-scented skin and swirls of hair the color of sunlight, all around him, and it wasn't just this blasé plotting of her demise he had to apologize for: it was this, this thunder in his chest and the swelling in his throat, and he didn't know when it had happened, he didn't know _why _it had happened, but somewhere along the way he fell like a damn brick for Quistis Trepe with the soft laugh and softer smile, and he was _sorry_- she hadn't been forgotten, not ever, but this woman behind him was _here _and she understood him, she'd offered him kindness he didn't even deserve-

He let her stand there with her cheek against his neck and her arms around his waist, and he did not open his eyes or unwind his fists, and her soft-velvet skin and her sunlight hair did not peel themselves away until his shoulders stopped shaking.

The heels on her boots tap-tap-tapped their careful methodical way around in front of him, and he did not open his eyes.

"You're not alone, Squall. That's all you have to remember. And if you need to talk, about anything- you can come to me anytime. I might not be your instructor anymore, but I am your friend."

And now his lids pried themselves free of cinema shadows- _children up to their shins in boiling white foam and neon red painted into white-wax cheeks- _and there was a smile on her face, for _him_, a smile that struck the final finishing blow and left it quivering in his heart-

His left foot edged itself forward and the right scraped itself after, and he brought both arms up in a loop around her trim training-whittled waist, and another smile and a return squeeze of her arms, and she was too close to yank herself away.

* * *

><p>Her lips underneath his yield, sponge, and he brings both hands up to cup her cheeks, and forward, forward, forward he sinks: she is all hard-muscle athlete and soft curves of woman, and he kisses her until stunned statue limbs become heat-stinging slaps of palm press against his chest-<p>

And he lets go.

Her eyes go on forever, behind glasses he has knocked slightly askew.

"Squall-"

He walks away.

* * *

><p>She sits down with her back against the railing and stares out into tobacco wind, and the rust on the ground and the few leftover stars in the trees rustle themselves like old bones in black-rot remains of fishermen's shacks.<p>

* * *

><p>Step, step…pivot off the left into a tightly-tucked flip, and it couldn't be <em>that <em>fucking hard, because anything goddamned Wuss could do, he could do with both hands behind his back and a gun at his head-

"_Goddammit_!"

Right on his _fucking _head.

He stood up with one hand on the hard gnarl of cramp in his neck and a scowl on his lips, and a contemplative cock of his head put the padded gym wall at a new angle; he popped his neck and his knuckles and bounced lightly on his toes, keeping everything warm and loose and oiled with all the pissed-off blood drumming in his veins, and a reptilian hiss from the direction of the door did not so much as shift his eyes from their narrowed assessment.

Step, step, _push_-

"Fuck _shit_!"

"What the hell are you doing?"

He glared up at Wuss' stupid asshole face from the wax-gleaming floor, crossing both arms over his chest. "I'm trying to take a fucking _nap_. You goddamned _mind_?"

Zell squatted down beside his head, scrunching up his forehead like he was forcing a shit. "On the gym floor? Really? Ya' know, this one time I was in here practicing, and it was really hot, so I took my pants off, and you know how sometimes when you're wearing boxers stuff kinda' just slips out? Unless you're like really small or something, like this one guy I saw in the locker room a few years ago- looked like a baby's, man; he didn't last long cause everyone gave him so much shit about his dong he just dropped out, but, I mean, like, normal guys sometimes just pop their shit out without meaning to, and so this one time while I was practicing without any pants, I was doing this spin kick combo, and I was getting really tired, and I lost my balance halfway through the third one and I fell, and while I was just laying there for a sec, getting my bearings again, I realize my thing had popped out. Like, all the way out. Not like the turtle's poking its head out, like _holy shit my whole schlong is catching breeze_. And I'm pretty sure I was laying right where your face is right now."

"'The turtle's poking its head out' refers to taking a shit, you fucking moron," Seifer snarled. "Are you sure you didn't land on your fucking head?"

"It's whatever I want it to mean, dude. And, man, you're a real sweetheart today." He poked Seifer's sweaty cheek and pulled his finger away with a frown, wiping it on his shorts. "Ya' get in trouble with Quisty or something?"

He scowled harder.

"What'd you do this time?"

"Beat up that little faggy jacket emo cunt."

Zell smirked and rocked back on his heels. "You've gotta' get over this whole Squall thing."

"What the fuck do you mean 'this whole Squall thing'? He wants to fucking bone Trepe. And his face just gets on my fucking nerves; it'd look a lot better with my fist in it."

"Why don't you just let it go, man? Quistis is with you. She doesn't care about Squall that way. Even if he's got a thing for her, what's the big deal? So what. Quisty's hot. Lots of guys want to bone her. Just 'cause Squall's one of them doesn't mean you should sit around like, shitting yourself."

"Who fucking else wants to bone her?"

Zell scratched the side of his head. "Uh, I dunno, maybe that fan club of hers? And, you know, I mean, she's got that whip and everything, and I'm pretty sure it wasn't just me that had some fantasies and stuff while she was doing demonstrations with it during Combat 301."

A kip and a shove and over went Wuss right onto his bony fucking ass, and there was still enough nuclear anger burning off in his system to make him want to shove his fist through Wuss' goddamned teeth, if he said one more fucking word.

"I'm _kidding_. Jeez."

"No you're not. I saw those fucking demonstrations. The only one not sporting wood were those two idiots from Instructor Brandon's class, the ones Raij caught fucking in one of the supply closets."

"Well, what's up with those stupid skirts? It's like, Garden kinda' frowns on us doinking fellow students, not that that really stops anyone, and then they make the girls' uniforms like three inches away from flashing cheek. By the way, I saw your girlfriend's butt a couple of times when she bent over her desk to grab something."

Seifer wiped an arm across his forehead, and flicked droplets of sweat in Zell's direction. "If you don't shut the fuck up, you're going to be wearing your dick for a hat."

"It's not like I made any comments about it or anything. And you wouldn't touch my dick, because then all your closet homosexual feelings for me would be really obvious, and then things would get awkward, and I'd have to tell Quisty you were leaving her for me, and then I'd have to figure out how to let you down without getting violently prison-raped. You're not really good with the whole rejection thing, man."

Seifer sneered. "Well, when you never have to deal with it…"

"Pfft. What a bunch of crap." He bounced agilely back onto his feet, took a running start at the padded sweat-stained wall Seifer had spent the better part of an hour failing to conquer, touched down once, twice, again, and then thrust himself out and away from it into a neat cannonball of a flip, landing perfectly. "By the way, is that what you were trying to do?"

"Go fuck yourself."

"Not like I have any other options right now," he said glumly, seating himself on the floor beside Seifer.

"Yeah, especially because I'm sure as soon as Ellone's back, she'll come to her senses and decide she'd rather put a leaking battery in there than actually sit on your dick again. Are you sure you didn't slip her a roofie or something, when she slept with you? I mean, she was totally conscious and everything, right?"

Zell glanced a punch off his shoulder and leaned forward to drape both arms loosely across his knees, frowning. "Why do you have to be such a dick all the time?"

"When you're good at something…"

"Yeah, well maybe if _you _want to get laid, you should go apologize to Quistis for whatever it is you did. I'm gonna' take a wild guess and say you probably weren't just acting in self-defense."

"Technically, that HIV-infected asshole _did _start it."

"Well, what'd ya' say to piss him off?"

"That it's been a real pleasure to work with him throughout my SeeD career, and that I hope to do so for a long time, and I also mentioned how fucking lovely he was looking this morning. For a HIV-infected asshole."

"So I'm thinking…something about his 'deep-seated homosexual tendencies' and how if he so much as looked at Quistis ever again you'd bend him over a table and bone him with my dick until he didn't enjoy it anymore. Probably something about how small his penis is, too."

"I knew his penis was small."

"It's not really that small. It's actually at least average, probably more- I mean, I'm not sure, cause it's not like I've _measured _it or anything, you know, but you see stuff in a dressing room, and some of it's stuff you can never take back, like that one guy with the really hairy ass- you ever seen him? Man, it looks like something's trying to _escape_. Like it's clawing its way free or something, and when it gets loose it's going to just start eating people."

"Hey, here's an idea: how about we change the subject to something more pleasant than some shithead's furry ass and the size of Pubes' pinhead penis? For instance, getting all your teeth knocked out in prison so you can suck better dick. That seems preferable to me."

"Maybe you don't want to talk about Squall's penis because it makes you nervous, because if you think about it too much, you'll realize that all this competition between you guys is really just a bunch of sexual tension."

"Why don't you shut the fuck up before I stick one of those barbells up your ass?"

"Look, if you want to experiment or something, all you have to do is ask. I'm gonna' say no, but it'd be kinda' flattering to know that I'm completely irresistible to both sexes."

Seifer leaned back on both elbows with a scowl, shutting his eyes. "Choke on my balls, Wuss."

"Dude, seriously: stop hitting on me. It's getting to the point where it's starting to make me uncomfortable."

He rolled his eyes.

A throat clear and a sideways flicker of a peripheral glance, and Zell nudged the point of his shoulder into the meat of Seifer's own. "Hey, uh…how are you doing…with everything, you know?"

He looked down at the chewed-up knuckles of his right hand, and swallowing took an entire fucking eternity.

What could he possibly fucking say, to encompass all this cold empty _echoing _inside of him; how the fuck did he vocalize flickers of night shadow on the ceiling over his head; thin streams of smoke clouds dangling from his lips into October night, because all he could do was sit for fucking hours on his front porch watching the sky and the skeletons of buildings around him-

And the spot where Irvine Kinneas had softly murmured his last breath, how did he describe that: flattened grass stalks in the shape of his duster and his hat and his limply outstretched arms- who the fuck _could _describe nests of rodents in your goddamned gut, writhing and chewing and wriggling, eating away and away and away until you were only liquid fucking knees and ash-feather heart-

He rubbed his eyes.

He glared at the sweat-patterned wall in front of him, and rolled his hands into fists.

"It's real…it's just empty in the house, you know? I think…I think that's the worst part. I mean…I almost wish it had burned down too, you know? Just so I wouldn't have to…just so I wouldn't have to sit around staring at Exeter just sitting there against the kitchen door, like he's coming back for it."

He coughed the warm lump from his throat and blinked acrid wet heat from his eyes, and the clock on the wall over their heads tick tick tocked, and beside him Wuss cleared his throat harder and tightened his hands palm-down across his knees, and inside his mouth his tongue scraped together the pieces of his voice, and he coughed again.

"There's a couch at my place. Dog has to fucking sleep outside, though," he snapped.

Wuss' hands did not move.

He flicked the pad of his thumb across those knuckles open like smiles, and tongued the pieces of his voice back down into his throat, before they could shatter again.

"Thanks, man."

A subtle shift of a glance showed him the fleeting curve of a smile, picking up one corner of the asshole's lips, and somewhere inside of him something loosened like a knot coming undone.

An abrupt slap of both hands coming down on his knees put this sappy shit to rest for fucking good, and he stood up with a cellophane crinkle of popped knees and cracked back, and from his position on the floor Zell squinted up at the hand he extended down.

"Let's spar, asshole."

An eyeblink of hesitation and then a blinding flash of white-bleached teeth and suddenly they were toe to toe, and before his eyes could cycle themselves through a blink of their own, one of Wuss' fucking little girl hands shot out and slapped him a sternum blow hard enough to put him off-balance into the wall at his back.

"What the _fuck_-"

"You don't say 'go' in a fight, Alm_ass_y." His sneakers squeaked shuffling little slides of steps across the gym floor underneath him, and he stepped, whirled, and Seifer just barely ducked the backfist that whistled over his head and glanced off the padded wall behind him instead.

"You festering shithole."

Zell sidestepped out of his reach, twitched himself backward, and flicked up his left thumb, gesturing with the other hand.

He was going to break off that thumb and make Wuss _eat _it.

He lunged.

* * *

><p>"Sometimes they talk to me. Not <em>them<em>- the other them, you know?"

She does not know.

She just wants to go _home_.

Water color skies blacken into moonless midnight and from there ripple into soft white noon, and she listens to her watch tick tick ticking on her wrist and the thump thump thumping of her heart, and she does not want to _hear _anymore, please just let her _go_, give her _back_-

Soft white noon smudges itself into starless black forever, and the voice goes on talking talking talking and she rolls herself tighter into this cream-painted corner of wall intersecting wall, but she can still _hear_, she will never _stop _hearing-

"Do you think Seifer's coming back?"

She prays he will and fervently hopes he won't, because maybe she is all alone, maybe she can't _stand _another second here in the presence of this thing that wears the skin of her old friend, but he slipped the noose once and it's not fair to wish it right back over his neck, even if she is so very very _afraid_.

"I think he will. He promised he'd stay with me, Ellone. He _promised_. They wouldn't break any more promises, would they? After Balamb? You understand why I did that, right? I _had _to. They _said _I had to."

The tick tick ticking watch on her wrist winds down and down and down and finally dies with its final beat stopped halfway between the second hour and the fifth minute, and it will forever be 2:05 in this world she is never going to break free of, this gradual drip by drop melting of water color morning into soft white noon into moonless eternity, and please please _please _let him come back; _don't _let him _ever _come back-

She slides herself down into memories of children on a beach and handsome young soldiers with nervously tick tick tocking legs on ragged barstool wood and Zell Dincht's soft sleep-slack face beside her own and if she can just _see _him again, please-

The voices talk and talk and talk, and sometimes they are Rinoa's and sometimes they are not, and sometimes they might be inside her own head, and she lays her cheek down against her dead silent watch and squeezes her eyes shut until livewire fingers insert themselves like fishermen's hooks in her brain-

And she screams.

She goes on screaming for a very long time.

* * *

><p>"I need you to put me back into a coma."<p>

Dr. Kadowaki lifted her head from the paperwork in front of her with a long slow slide of a blink, and stretched an ancient prune-wrinkled hand toward her glasses. "Excuse me?"

Quistis seated herself on the edge of the chair across from her, crossing both legs at the ankle, her kettledrum heart pounding its faltering thunderstorm rhythm into the bones of her chest. "I need to be placed in a medically-induced coma."

"Quistis, that's only done in extreme circumstances, to prevent brain damage in a critically injured patient."

"It's also the only way to find Rinoa. When I was unconscious, she was able to find her way to me somehow. Nothing like that has happened while I'm sleeping, which leads me to believe it had something to do with the coma itself."

"Squall's looking for her."

"Squall's _been _looking for her, before Balamb and since, and he hasn't found anything. She won't be found unless she wants to be. If this is the only way-"

"Have you told Seifer about any of this?" Dr. Kadowaki interrupted with a frown, sliding her glasses over far enough to rub the corner of one eye, her lips crumpling themselves into a little sour-lemon ball, bleached white around the edges. "The tumors I found, the small but possible chance Rinoa could pass the succession on to you?"

"Of course not. He'll kill anyone that makes a try for her, if he thinks harming her will hurt me."

Kadowaki shifted her glasses back into place with a sigh. "Quistis, maybe you should think about this."

Her hands rolled themselves into pale-moon fists on her thighs, humped with little slithering blue snakes of vein beneath drumskin knuckles. "It's not necessary for him to know about any of this. It's my decision; his opinion has no bearing on this."

"It's 'not necessary for him to know'? Quistis, he loves you. If he is the one to kill Rinoa, he deserves to know all the consequences of doing so. He certainly deserves to know there is a small chance he might be killing you as well."

She leaned back in her chair with a sigh, pushing both middle fingers into her pounding temples. "It'll only be a distraction. Whatever…whatever he has to do, he needs to be able to do. If he knows about this, he'll run straight to Rinoa, to protect her this time, and he can't…" She pressed the heel of her hand into the bridge of her nose, and tiredly closed both eyes. "I'm not sure he can survive that again, being…being a toy to one of them. You don't know what it did to him, the first time."

"I have an idea," she replied softly. "Seifer suffered more than anyone during the war. He won't give himself back to that lightly. But it's his choice as well, Quistis, and he needs to _know_. Don't leave him in the dark about this. Tell him. Tell him, and then come back here to discuss your options with me. I'll see if anything can be done that might be helpful, without putting you at risk."

She frowned and peeled her hand away from her nose, setting it down on top of the desk. "Then you won't help me?"

"At the moment? No. When you've talked things over with Seifer, then come back and see me."

She stood very abruptly, banging her knees on the underside of the desk.

"Fine," she said icily, and left.

* * *

><p>A kick fired from the hip stamped doorknob impressions into crumbling white plaster and three jabbering cadets peeled themselves apart around Pubes' desk like parting ripples of morning in-tide, and a lunge and a reach and the asshole's shirt collar was in his fucking <em>hand<em>, and that slender white throat was only another milimeter away, just goddamned begging to be snapped like kindling between his white knuckles-

"What the fuck is _this_?" he screamed, his hand slapping down onto Squall's desk a little blue plastic square of a flip phone, the casing grinding itself into polished wood with a crack like a gunshot.

The cadets scattered like frightened fucking sheep, and back to your goddamned _mommies_, kids, unless you want a fucking taste of this too; another yank put him nose to nose with this bland-faced robot fucking _queer_ and a sharp jerk and a lift and he had the asshole sprawled halfway across his desk, eyes owl-wide beneath all that fucking girl hair.

"Your _girlfriend's _not here to save you this time," he snarled. "You keeping my side of the bed warm when I'm gone, huh, Pubes? Letting her perfect her dick sucking techniques under your desk during all those 'meetings'?" He jerked the hand wrapped up in Pubes' collar forward, brought it down hard, bounced the asshole's face off the top of his desk and yanked him back up smeared red, his nose a little flatter across the bridge. "I'm going to _fucking _kill you-"

Rain-drumming footsteps in the hall behind him tangled his fingers tighter into the lapel of Pubes' SeeD uniform and brought him snarling up onto his toes, dragging Garden's commander with him.

* * *

><p>Squall spits in his face, and <em>fuck it <em>if he thinks that's going to save him- see what happens to assholes that fuck him over, here it comes, you shit, you diseased fucking _hole: _three to the face and one to the gut, and he bets it doesn't hurt as much as he does right now- all she had to do was fucking _tell him_-

A whip of his neck pulls Squall's collar from Seifer's fingers and now the desk overturns with a bang and the chair snaps with a sharp matchstick shatter and paperwork snowfall wings into the air like white doves taking flight, and he swings, he swings, he _swings_; salt sweat in his eyes and copper rust on his lips, and he wraps Puberty Boy in a bear hug tight enough to snap the fucker's _spine _if he squeezes just another inch, another _milimeter_-

His sight smears red, and it's Pubes' blood or his anger, he's not sure which-

And the rain-drumming footsteps melt away into the background and there is nothing but meat-thuds of strikes going on and on and on, but it still fucking _hurts_-

He is finishing what he started this morning-

The rain-drumming footsteps are back, spreading out and out and out behind him, and tinny click click clicks of safeties ticking off echo in his ears and hum live feedback through his teeth, and he swings again, _again_-

Pull him off, he fucking _dares _you- shoot him like a fucking animal, _do it now_, because it's the only way you're going to save this quivering piece of shit at his feet-

In this small square of space, the explosions are each as loud as bombs going off.

He is hammered into wet red mist.

* * *

><p>Three days in lock-up is all he gets, surprisingly enough, and too fucking bad: Pubes isn't dead after all.<p>

Broken nose and a couple of bruised ribs, and if they'd just held off with those riot rounds for a few seconds longer, there might be another rain-shining headstone in the sand beside his mother and Selphie and Irvine, only this one he wouldn't give two fucking _shits _about, except maybe to steam his name in block letter yellow into the soft earthworm mound at its base.

Let _her _weep over the fucking asshole. Let her drop by with flowers and little scraps of paper bearing her love letter sentiments, and fuck them _both_.

He answers his phone only once. "Don't _fucking _call me again, _Instructor_."

When he lays down at night to contemplate his night-shadowed ceiling, he sees only that little blue plastic square of flip phone he snatched from the hands of some giggling third year bitch.

It's all inscribed there for him to read in low-quality black and white, not low-quality enough to explain away her hands on his chest and her face in his palms, and knowing he was only second best after all finishes the blow Irvine Kinneas' death dealt his withered fucking heart, and for a very long time all he can do is just lie here underneath this ceiling underneath this roof painted in starless midnight smoke, and not sleep.

* * *

><p>"It doesn't matter now," she said dully.<p>

"Why don't you just explain to him-"

"He's not interested in explanations." Behind her glasses her eyes softly blinked themselves shut, and stayed. "Will you do it or not?"

A sigh. A soft creaking of leather in wear-faded seat back. "Quistis-"

"Please. _Please_."

Another sigh. A fluttering heartbeat concussion of papers tapping themselves into perfectly-aligned order.

"Lie down on the bed, please."

* * *

><p>"Squall, do you have a moment?" Ellen Kadowaki paused with one hand beneath her glasses, tiredly rubbing away sleepless bruises from beneath her lashes. "It's important-" she stopped.<p>

In the doorway leaned a broad silhouette of a man, one hip against the wall, both arms across his chest, eyes on Quistis Trepe's gently rising/falling/rising stomach, and all she could feel now was the numb little circle inside her chest that was supposed to be her heart, because one torn-up hand cradled in the crook of his elbow and another shallow gash dripping blood down his forehead and still he had eyes only for this one woman sandwiched between white-snow sheets, shallowly breathing underneath the weight of layers upon layers of anesthetic dream.

"Actually," she said quietly, "never mind. It can wait, if you're busy."

The phone clicked softly in its receiver.

He did not look up. "What the fuck is going on?"

"You again? Don't I see you in here enough?"

He held up his red-dripping hand, stretching the other up to scratch the side of his jaw. "Fucked it up on a T-Rex. I came here to get some stitches. What the hell is wrong with her?" he snapped. "Is she-" He trailed off with one hand in the hair at the nape of his neck, face twisting, smoothing out, convulsing again, and the child just broke her _heart_, standing there with his eyes full of all the things he did not want to still feel.

"She's fine, for the moment. She asked for this to be done to her. After Balamb, while she was in a coma, Rinoa was able to reach her- Rinoa as she used to be, not what she is now. Quistis thinks this is the only way to communicate with the small part of Rinoa that is still lucid, since merely going to sleep doesn't seem to produce the same results. She requested that I put her into a medically-induced coma."

He looked sharply up at her from beneath his lowered eyebrows, scowling. "What the fuck do you mean she's fine, 'for the moment?'"

"Medically-induced comas are generally a last resort for critically-injured patients, to prevent brain damage or further brain damage- you'll see it done with gunshot victims, for instance, who were struck in the head but are still alive and retain most of their cognitive functioning. By essentially shutting down the body and suspending it in its current state, it gives the brain time to heal without the body shutting off blood flow to any damaged portions and therefore retaining all or most- depending upon the severity of the wound and how quickly medical attention was received- brain function. I didn't do it lightly, Seifer, believe me, but I used a much smaller dose than would normally be utilized in this sort of situation, and with careful monitoring, I think she'll be all right."

"You fucking _think_?" The hand he'd dropped to lie loosely dangling along his side tightened into a fist.

She adjusted her glasses on the end of her nose, and carefully straightened the pile of paperwork in front of her. "Get onto the other bed so I can take a look at that hand."

He did not move. "What if you fucked up and she doesn't come out of it? Are you both fucking _retarded_?"

"Seven years studying medicine at a prestigious university would suggest otherwise," she replied dryly. "Seifer, I know you're concerned. But Rinoa will hurt more people if she isn't stopped. And she wouldn't have wanted that. And Irvine…" She lowered her head to quietly cough free the hitch in her voice. "Irvine was very dear to Quistis. She wants Rinoa found. She thinks this is the only way. I did attempt to advise her to at least discuss…matters with you first, but considering recent events…I believe she just wanted a way to escape. This was merely a way to kill two birds with one stone."

"'Matters?' Oh, you mean that picture of her sucking face with Pubes? You mean the whole thing where she was fucking around behind my back?"

"I think you need to hear her out when she's again among those of us who are conscious. It isn't what you think. For the record- and you may take this with a grain of salt, since it's just one old woman's opinion- it's very apparent to me how much she cares for you, and has been for a long time. It's your own insecurities and an unfortunate misunderstanding getting in the way of you being able to see that. Quistis' little crush on Squall was always just that: an infatuation. It could never even hold a candle to what's between the two of you, and if you don't want to lose her, you might want to think long and hard on that." She slid her clipboard off the stack of neatly-arranged paperwork in front of her, and with a wet little click of old knees smoothing themselves into liquid-limbed upright around even older bones, she flattened one hand out across the broad curve of a hip, frowning at him. "Seifer." A jerk of her chin indicated the bed to Quistis' left. "Sit."

He did not. "How long is she…how long is she going to be like that?" he asked, and now his voice broke just slightly, and again her heart squeezed itself into a tiny little star of a thing, just a pinprick among black eons of empty space.

"She wanted to be left for a few days, at first. We'll go from there, depending upon what happens. The last time, Rinoa was the one who forced her out of the coma, somehow. Quistis isn't sure how she did it; she only remembers sitting in Edea's garden talking, and then the next thing she knew, Rinoa was telling her that she wanted to try something, and all of a sudden she was back here. I don't understand it, but then again, Rinoa's magical abilities are far beyond anything I've ever seen. Adel, Ultimecia…I'm afraid they may have merely been scratching the surface of what a sorceress is capable of. I don't know if it has something to do with what was done to her while she was in Odine's lab, or if perhaps in addition to having Adel's powers transferred to her, she was also imbued with Ultimecia's…who knows. We'll probably never be entirely sure." She drummed her pen on the edge of her clipboard, nudging her glasses up the bulb of her nose to settle perfectly across the bridge. "Seifer, sit."

"I'm not a fucking dog," he snapped.

"You're dripping blood all over my infirmary, young man, and I've got no techs on hand to clean it up, so who do you think will be stuck with that particular joy, hmm? She'll still be here when I'm finished stitching you up. Sit down."

* * *

><p>She was so fucking <em>pale<em>; purple hollows beneath her eyes and thin tissue paper white across them, and he could barely even _see _the goddamned ceiling above him, trying to blink through all his layers and layers of heat-stinging weakness.

Sometimes pride was the only goddamned thing you had left, didn't this old bitch understand that? Maybe he still loved Quistis- _fuck it_, he did; she could shit all over his heart, burn it into the same shriveled little black-singed ball of meat he had said goodbye to on grass scented tobacco wind and dandelion death, and he'd still love her- but forgiveness was another fucking thing entirely.

All he'd wanted, after all, was her. No more grandiose dreams, no more sunset ambitions, no more 'once upon a times' where everyone lived happily ever after, because the thing was, there _were _no happily ever afters or once upon a times for people like them: there was only time, ticking on, spinning forward, always moving too goddamned fast, and he was too fucking tired to hope for anything more. But him and her and a house by the sea, and maybe no growing old for people like them, but growing _together_, that was the fucking _plan_, and was Squall _fucking _Leonhart really so much _better _than him and couldn't she have just _fucking told him_?

He felt the needle punch in, out, little sharp-stinging stars of winter frostbite here here and fucking here, and the thing was, it didn't hurt even nearly as much as his chest, right now.

He tipped his head back against soft detergent-scented pillow down and swallowed salt-copper bile and he concentrated on that fucking needle moving in out, back, forth, and the ticking of the clock on the wall and the soft machine-monitored sigh of her breathing, and if Kadowaki slipped and hit a fucking artery, he didn't goddamned care.

"You're done, Seifer," she told him quietly.

He closed his eyes.

The lump in his throat was the size of a fucking baseball. "I'll stay."

He listened to the soft rubber-soled squeaking of her shoes on the floor, and did not open his eyes. "It's going to be a while. I think you should probably-"

"I'm fucking _staying_," he snarled.

She scuffed silently away on those soft rubber-soled shoes, drumming her pen.

* * *

><p>She waits for a very long time.<p>

Around her swirl gray-autumn clouds that break apart into purple stormfront and from there shimmer into hot yellow noon, and she waits.

The sun is consumed inch by inch by inch, and then reborn: nuclear white glare in her eyes that paints into stark relief bone-rattling stalks of emaciated garden, and she waits.

She waits.

She waits.

She waits she waits she _waits_.

Soft October rain braids long sheets of sunshine hair into brown-wheat ropes that straggle and drip and sag sadly down her shoulders.

She waits.

She lets the ocean's ceaseless murmur pound away all her thoughts, pour its thundering white noise into her head like low quality audio on high, and she tightens her hands on her knees and blinks both eyes gently shut behind her glasses, and it hurts too _much _to remember; she wants to stay here always, waiting waiting waiting-

Waiting for what?

Success? Forgiveness? Redemption?

She deserves none of these things.

What she deserves, this fumbling failure of a woman sitting on an empty shoreline while fall tides wash clean her bare pale feet, is nothing. Is an _eternity _of nothing, an entire eon of sitting in this soft white sand waiting for something that is never going to come to her, and she thinks with a sharp knife prickle of pain about child Quistis, who was going to achieve great things, who was going to accomplish, succeed, _excel_-

She wipes her eyes.

She waits.

She lays her head back in the sand and spreads out her arms, and a clench of her heart and a squeeze of her callused soldier's hands into cold white fists and she can almost feel him next to her, if she concentrates hard enough, if she _believes_- if she can only get past the fact that he is never again going to lie beside her with one hand on her hip and his nose in her hair-

She waits.

* * *

><p>The bulbs overhead dimmed, painting cancer pallor across his bruised knuckles.<p>

He tucked both hands behind his head and watched her monitor spike, spike, spike, little uneven hills across all that starless black forever, and he remembered watching those same green-glowing spikes a year ago, chasing themselves into oblivion, on and on and fucking on, spinning themselves liked a goddamned CD player on loop until they spun themselves right the fuck off the edge, into graveyard silence.

He smoothed loose strands of hair back behind one ear, and what the fuck _was _it about this woman- fucking Pubes had her all along, and still he couldn't fucking let go, still he couldn't roll himself to the other side of his bed, away from her, away from this sleek-silk hair beneath his fingers and this goddamned yearning in his heart-

Fuck this _shit_: what the hell was he even _doing _here, watching over her like it wasn't someone else she wanted hovering here, waiting for her to come back to them; what the fuck was his _problem_- let _go_, turn her fucking loose, let her run straight to Pubes' goddamned pathetic tree twig _dick_; what a fucking _whore_, what a _cunt_, stringing him along like that-

He clenched his hand beside her face, watched the knuckles bulge up, flatten back out.

He _loved _her. He still fucking did, would never fucking _stop_, and didn't that fucking _mean anything _to her-

Fucking _Squall Leonhart _was she fucking _serious_- what the fuck was it with the guy anyway; was his cock fucking _candy-flavored _or something-

She shifted beneath those white-snow sheets and breathed a soft little huff of a sigh that drained all the anger from his heart and the thumping blood bass in his fingertips, and he rocked himself up onto one hip and reached out for her again, tonguing sticky wet heat back down into his throat.

Her eyes twitched.

He pulled his hand back.

* * *

><p>Gray-autumn clouds begin to pull themselves apart in the sky above her.<p>

She watches them dissolve into cream-pale squares of ceiling tiles and beneath her all that soft white sand stretches and flickers and cross-fades into crackling paper-thin sheets the same color-

And all the muscles in her neck tighten, spasm, and off to one side flops her head, sliding, slipping, _rushing _down down _down_-

His face is so close she can see all the faint constellations of his freckles, and this close his eyes are so very very _green_, like spring, like new life growing and flourishing and getting speckled with sea-salt wind carrying in its fingers little acid droplets of ocean spray-

She blinks.

He has shifted backward, or she is drifting away; the freckles smear, blur into wax-doll skin that reminds her of graveyard dirt tap tap tapping away at silk-pillowed caskets, and isn't he taking care of himself, the big idiot-

She slides, slips, _rushes_, down down _down_, and it is not just her head this time.

* * *

><p>He squeezed his hand, relaxed it in gradual inch by inch increments, and now along those white-snow sheets it crept toward her awkwardly-angled neck, loosely sagging down the slope of her pillow.<p>

"You fucking bitch," he said without any malice, and he remembered another woman he just never could stay mad at, lightning forks of veins along her temples and hot yellow fever in her eyes, and how fucking ironic was it: half his goddamned life spent chiseling and hammering and sweating his way into a perfect physical specimen of a soldier, stronger, faster, _better _than anyone had ever even guessed possible, and all it took was a couple of x chromosomes to goddamned _annhilate _him.

He leaned over her, paused, pressed his forehead down against her own, squeezed his eyes shut as hard as he could force them closed, breathed her soft soap-scent and her lemonbalm hair, and he just fucking _existed_, just for that one moment, not talking, thinking, moving; Seifer Almasy and Quistis Trepe and the quiet click click tick of the clock on the wall and this was all he _wanted_, goddammit- why did she have to go and fuck it up-

He kissed her anyway, because he was a fucking moron, because she still had in a vise his dick and his heart and everything else that mattered even one miniscule fucking bit, and maybe this was good-bye, maybe that was the last time he was ever going to watch her eyes flick themselves softly open into hazy half-lidded consciousness, and he pushed his forehead into her own like he could just melt right the fuck into her and brought one scar-notched hand up to cup her cheek, and now the other slid up toward his neck-

He pulled away with his heart in his throat and soft mercury glow at her own, and another lean forward and down his hand swept, tucking into the neckline of her blue-velvet shirt the dog tags that had survived his whole illustrious fucking life.

She sighed and shifted, shifted and sighed, and he turned away with both hands in fists at his sides, and the door was just so goddamned far _away_-

He spun back.

He eased himself silently down on the bed perfectly parallel to her own, and folded both hands between his knees.

He waited.

* * *

><p>She waits.<p>

The stars come out. October clouds patch themselves over these pinpricks of far-away light and the sand beneath her is draped suddenly in midnight shadow, black as the hollows she can feel beneath her eyes.

She waits.

* * *

><p>He waited.<p>

He brushed strands of hair from her lips and absentmindedly rubbed raspberry smears of gloss into the seam of his pants, and that goddamned clock on the wall click click ticked, through one hour and the next and the next, and still he waited.

* * *

><p>She waits.<p>

The screen door bangs.

She watches smiling ghosts of children pour themselves through all the gaps between weathered old wood and sloppily slanting mesh-wire silver, and beneath yellow summer sky her dead-wood heart warms itself before furnace memories, and the funny thing is, all of her best ones feature him.

Why didn't she notice that before?

She squeezes her eyes shut beneath yellow summer sky and she just sits, breathing, smelling, _listening_, and what's ironic is this is the most at peace she's been for a long time now.

She thinks maybe she shouldn't bother even coming back; here her pain is only a dull throbbing abscess behind her heart, a memory of a wound, and if she concentrates, really _focuses_, she can pretend these smiling ghosts of children are really here, they are _happy_: they did not grow up to be soldiers who fell in love too hard and got hurt too badly and died too young, but doctors, lawyers, nurses, normal men and women with families to come home to and friends who love them, who are _alive_-

In the salt-stinging waves around her ankles splash two children, blonde, one bossy, one defiant, and watching them from beside her on the shoreline are a boy with his hands full of dandelion weeds, and the bashfully smiling yellow-sun girl who takes them from him with a smile.

She inhales, exhales, flicks her eyes open, molds them carefully shut-

She waits.

She waits.

Yellow summer sky becomes cinnamon dust in the air and brittle-glass bones on the ground, and she does not pull her feet free of fall tides or shake the leaves from her hair, and she goes on waiting.

* * *

><p>He gave the tags around her neck one final tweak, a last brush of his hand over the strands of hair that had fallen down over her eyes again, and a throat clear that stuck on the second note and a hard thin press of his lips and he turned away, for good this time.<p>

He did not look back.

The door hissed open with a sigh that breathed warm exhalations of stale vent-circulated air into his face, and he stopped in the opening with one foot on mirror-polished hallway tile and the other on equally reflective infirmary terrazzo, and _fuck it_, maybe he couldn't do this after all-

He tightened his hands on the frame and his lips down over his teeth, and he remembered Quistis Trepe's lips on Squall fucking Leonhart's mouth, and he let go of the frame and edged his other foot up to join the one on mirror-polished hallway tile, and behind him the door whispered closed and sealed itself with a suction-cup sigh-

And he turned back after all.

She looked so goddamned peaceful lying there, hair spread out around her face in a white-gold cloud, hands folded loosely across her stomach, and it hurt so fucking _badly_, to think that she'd belonged to someone else all this time.

He slid one hand down into his pocket, let it coil itself up into a fist, and a breath and a heartbeat twitch of the lump in his throat and he spun, and one foot in front of the other, and he was gone.

* * *

><p>In sleep, Rinoa Heartilly is as blankly smooth-faced as a child. Cream cheeks and black-ink hair and pretty rosebud lips: a fairytale princess slumbering quietly on and on and on, waiting for her prince, and she doesn't think she can <em>do <em>this-

She lifts the small cold pistol she palmed from Fury Caraway's office desk drawer, and in her sweat-smeared palm it shivers, slides, creeps, like some horrible creature slithering its way between her fingers, and she makes a swipe for it with the other hand and slaps it securely squeezed between both, and off the safety clicks in her shivering shaking sweating fingers-

And down her face trickles acid warmth that burns through dermis and epidermis alike, it is that hot-

She pinches her trembling mouth shut, angles the barrel down at Rinoa Heartilly's gently rising chest, slips her finger through guard to trigger-

"Please please please pleasepleasepleaseplease_please_," she prays beneath her breath, and her finger slides, curls, encloses-

She cannot see; she is blind with all these layers of acid warmth that steam her face down to bone, and she doesn't want to _do _this- she just wants to go _home_- she just wants to lay in his arms on warm summer grass, reclined next to Irvine Kinneas with his hat pulled down over his eyes and Selphie Tilmitt in his lap, but that's not possible anymore, is it, not ever, and it's all because of this woman, this _bitch_ and she _hates _her- why can't she hurt as much as Ellone Andrin does right now; why _shouldn't _she-

She peels one hand away, wipes it down the seam of her pants, repositions it-

She can't.

She _can't_.

She slants the barrel all the way down, to the pretty satin-smooth temple of Rinoa Heartilly's peaceful sleep-slack face, and she shuts her eyes so hard white fireworks blast stars behind her lids-

Balamb in _ruins_; Irvine dead; _all _of them dead, as far as she knows, and it has to _stop_-

But she has never killed anyone before; she has never even intentionally _hurt _anyone before, and she _can't _she can't _she can't _she's _sorry_-

She feels all the muscles in her face clench and the ones in her hands go slack, and the gun clatters at her feet and she comes unraveled, bringing her hands palm-up over her face, and for a very long time she can only stand there, crying so hard she is utterly noiseless.

* * *

><p>She is brought back before she is ready, to actinic sun-glare over her head and Dr. Kadowaki's age-crumpled face beside her, and when she can bring herself to speak at last, she can't look anywhere except the roll of sheet she has molded between her fingers. "It didn't work."<p>

"No, it didn't. I'm sorry, Quistis. It was a good idea, but it's over now. I'm not risking putting you back under."

She shuts her eyes tiredly. "Fine."

There is the sound of Ellen Kadowaki shifting monitoring equipment, replacing bags of fluid, checking the IV line in her arm, and then without another word she disappears suddenly through the infirmary door into the hallway beyond, and for a very long time, Quistis is left all alone.

She brings her knees up onto her chest and rolls over onto her left side, and something slithers down between her breasts and stops at the little bow-studded band connecting both cups of her bra, cold against her skin.

She frowns and opens her eyes.

One needle-tingling hand down her shirt palms this cold slithering something and fishes it free into the light, and now she sits up abruptly enough to revolve the room around her into a carousel of gray walls/gunmetal instruments/green striped door, and a yank pulls the line from her arm and swings it back against the vitals monitor with a little tinkling crash, and she drops unsteadily down off the bed onto her feet.

The uneven little hills of green-glowing spikes on her screen crush themselves down into scrolling flatline forever, and she makes it to the door half a second later, stumbling up against it.

A hiss and a smoothly-oiled slide of door panel on well-maintained track and she is through, running, erratically, drunkenly, but how long has it been since he left, she thinks with her heart in her throat-

She shoves her way through students that stare curiously open-mouthed after her, and her motor skills slowly make their way back in trickles and drips and icy needle pricks of returning sensation, and she runs faster.

* * *

><p>"Squall said someone spotted Ellone in Esthar. He's getting a team together right now."<p>

He watched Seifer's head slowly tilt itself up, inch by inch by inch, his hands tightening on the cloth poised over Hyperion's gleaming blade, and a blink cleared the little furrow between his brows and wiped all the expression from his face, and now he stood with the gunblade over one shoulder, cloth across the other. "Let's go, then."

"You're just going to leave?" he blurted out. "What about-"

"Quistis? Who gives a fuck? She made her choice. It wasn't me."

"Dude, maybe you shouldn't just jump to conclusions; what if we…what if we don't come back, you know? Are you going to be ok, just leaving like this?"

A glare and a tightening of his jaw and he hefted Hyperion up a little higher, settling it into the notch between shoulder and neck. "I said _let's go_, Wuss. I don't want to hear another goddamned word about it, ok? Get your shit together, before fucking Pubes ships them off without us."

He slid his phone into his pocket and swallowed his heart back down into his chest, and his throat squeezed itself shut around any protest he so much as considered making, because none of them would help.

He shuffled off to the guest room in silence.

Somewhere in the house, a door slammed.


	28. Chapter Fifteen

**A/N: Ok, so obviously I lied about chapter-spamming during the week. (It wasn't an intentional lie, at least.) I did mean to, but then got caught up in working on my novelization, as well as being out of town for most of the day on Wednesday and Friday. The good news is that I already have a prologue, first chapter, and interlude for the novelization. The bad news is that I have decided to update this fic at my usual pace (instead of posting the remaining chapters all in one giant mass), so that I have time to get ahead of myself in my novelization and get a few chapters under my belt. So, really, this isn't all bad news-you have to wait a little longer to read the resolution of this fic, but it means I should have plenty of material to go for the novelization once I've wrapped this up, and will be able to immediately begin posting pieces of the novelization.**

**As always, thank you for all of your comments and encouragement. You guys give me the motivation to keep pushing myself. **

**Chapter Fifteen**

Esthar

"Ellone, you shouldn't hate me. I know you do. But what if…what if I was the whole reason you existed in the first place? Would you still hate me? If you were made for me? Not in the romantic sense…but for…for…people like me, like a companion…if that was your purpose, would you still…

You don't believe me, do you? You think I'm just rambling; you think I'm _crazy_-

Maybe you should come look at this."

* * *

><p>Balamb Garden<p>

Balamb

"We'll make landing in uniform; we are to pass ourselves off as the relief unit for one of the SeeD teams currently occupying Esthar. Once the switch has been carried out, we will change over to civilian and do reconnaissance. At the moment, we know Rinoa and Ellone are in Esthar, but not their exact location. SeeD Brekken from Squad B spotted Ellone very briefly early this morning, so we need to move fast. We have no idea if this is only a quick stopover for Rinoa, or if she's planning something similar to what happened in Balamb."

He flicked his trench coat up off his face and slowly blinked open both eyes, and against the seat back in front of him his feet twitched, twitched again, and leisurely uncrossed, thumping hollowly down against the floor beneath him. "And then what?"

Squall paused in his address, flicked a fleeting peripheral of a glance at him, frowned, and looked across the aisle at Wuss' pointy fucking head, clearing his throat. "Zell, set the coordinates for Esthar."

"No 'please'?" Seifer snapped. "You going to let him talk to you like that, Wuss?"

"It's an order," Squall replied tightly. "There doesn't need to be a 'please'."

"You didn't answer my question, Puberty Boy. You find Rinoa and Ellone. And then what the fuck are you going to do? Pull all three inches and scare her to fucking death?"

All around him crisply-uniformed SeeDs shifted uncomfortably in their seats, subtly glancing from leader to dissenter and back again, and beneath their scrutiny he tilted himself slowly forward, both elbows coming down on his knees, and now there was enough heat in his voice to let Pubes know he meant business about this whole not ignoring him thing.

"What are you going to do? She can completely fucking assbone this entire unit with a flick of her hand. Melt our eyeballs, explode our brains; you know, pleasant shit like that. What are you going to do against that, Pubes?" he sneered. "Ask her to pretty please go easy on us all, because once upon a time she was stupid enough to let you put your dick in her?"

Zell uncomfortably scratched his cheek tattoo, frowning. "Seifer-"

"Shut the fuck up. Your ass is on the line, too. You think you might at least want a plan first?"

"We'll regroup and plan our assault once we've found her. Until then, we don't know what kind of environment we're looking at- is she right in the center of the city, surrounded by innocents, hiding somewhere out on the outskirts; there are too many variables."

"Send me in ahead of the rest of the unit. I'll find her."

"No."

"Send me in, you knob-slobbing piece of shit."

"_Dude,_" Zell snapped. "You're not helping your case."

"You're lucky you're even _here_-"

"It's not fucking luck- you _need _me-"

"Zell," Squall interrupted with a finality that hazed red the entire passenger room, his whole fucking _world_-

"You're not going to do it, Pubes. You can't; you know that. We're talking about killing Rinoa- when it comes down to it, you'll choke. You shouldn't even fucking be here. I _can _do it. We're all here because you're trying to do what needs to be done, right? Then stay the fuck behind, and ship me out first. Let me get her to trust me; it's not going to be some bunch of trigger-happy assholes who bring her down- it's going to be someone she trusts, someone who's going to have to stab her in the back when she's not paying attention."

Squall's eyes narrowed. "Switching allegiances does come naturally to you."

Zell left with one final squint of his eyes and a rub of his cheek tattoo.

"_Fuck _yourself, Pubes. You think I _want _to be out there, getting goddamned _mind raped _again while you stay behind and fuck my girlfriend?"

The heads that had been swiveling cautiously back and forth between dissenter and leader nervously wrenched themselves away now, to study with calculated nonchalance the glacial blue window glass surrounding them.

A fractional tightening of Leonhart's robotically cold face was the only answer he got, and now he too turned to leave, one hand fisted on Lionheart's handle, like that was going to stop him, like _anything_ wasgoing to stop him if he wanted to go for the fucker's throat again-

"Don't walk away from me," he snarled.

Squall kept walking, shoulders set, back rigid, trap muscles rolling, settling, bunching back together beneath strained black material that had not yet been tailored to a twenty-one-year-old man and not a seventeen-year-old boy, and now he came to his feet with both hands in fists at his sides, and this asshole was _not walking away from him_-

"I _said _don't _fucking _walk away from me."

There was a hesitation in his next step, a fumbling in the tinny boot-clop echo of it off the polished floor, and he needed to turn the _fuck _around right now, because they were not _done _yet-

"Uh, Seifer," Zell called from outside the doorway, poking his head past Squall into the stagnant tension of the passenger room, somewhat deflated now by the intrusion of his voice, "Quistis is outside. I think you should probably go out there."

His hands unwound themselves.

He blinked.

This was just exactly the sort of shit he didn't need right now: what the fuck did she want anyway? What was left to say between them? He was a means to an end, a distraction; he got it. He was a bumbling, _fucking _retard to ever assume otherwise.

He didn't need it rubbed in his face, now, when he was probably not coming back; when he was about to look Rinoa Heartilly in her sweetly innocent face and stab her through the fucking spine the second she was dumb enough to believe he was on her side; when his dreams were still one long jumble of her smell her smile her laugh-

When he was not over her by a long shot, not even goddamned close, and fuck if he knew if he had the balls to walk away a second time.

He did not take his eyes off Squall's back. "Tell her to fuck off."

"_Yeah_; I'm just gonna' walk right out there and tell her "Yeah, Quisty? Seifer says to 'fuck off'. She'll take my _nuts_, man."

"It's not like you have a pair anyway."

Squall's interruption was a soft huff of a sigh and a shake of his head, and now those tinny boot-clopping echoes resumed themselves, tap tap tapping away out into the corridor beyond.

"She's standing right in front of the Ragnarok; I can't take off unless she moves, and she says she won't unless you come out and talk to her."

He'd given her _everything _he never even thought he could feel, and what the fuck else did she _want _from him-

Just her fucking name was sharp enough to hurt, to pierce, and he swallowed bile and clenched his fists into even whiter lumps that balled themselves stiffly along his legs, and he stared down through blue-glacial window glass like he could somehow see her through all those layers upon layers of canopy and clockwork machinery, ticking and humming and murmuring on all around him-

And a breath and a blink and a carefully methodical sealing off of his heart, sanding off all the rough edges, and he thought he might be ready.

"Fine, for shit's sake. This'll only take a second."

* * *

><p>She has not even changed her clothes.<p>

His tags in her hand, boots untied, little blonde cloud-wisps of hair escaping here and here and here-

He's never seen her so fucking unkempt before.

He stands on the Ragnarok's boarding ramp, arms folded, and says nothing.

She blinks up at him through her glasses, staring, _drinking_- that's what she's doing to him, like she knows this is it, the grand fucking finale, and he watches her pull his metal-gleaming tags tighter into her fist and press her lips into a thin white underscore of a line, and he feels an answering prickle in his chest, a tug, and he looks away like the sniveling fucking coward he is.

"You were just going to leave." It isn't a question.

He firms his jaw. "That was the plan. You're kind of fucking it up right now. We can't sit around with our thumbs up our asses all year, Trepe, so if you'd kindly move the fuck out of the way-"

"You left these behind but you won't even _talk _to me, before rushing off to get killed?" She rattles the tags in her fist, and the thin white underscore becomes a rumpled pucker: her old-lady lip purse, all sour-lemon crease and displeased brackets of premature crow's feet. He knows it well: he used to get it all the time as a cadet, after all.

"That was a _good-bye_, Instructor."

"The significance of the gesture was not lost on me," she replies coldly, glaring. "Why do you think I rushed all the way over here?" She releases the tags from her sweating fist to chime musically against her solar plexus, a little tangled cluster of mercury as bright as the moon. "Seifer-"

"Get out of the way, Trepe. We need to leave. I don't have time for this shit."

"You can't just _leave_," she snaps, taking a step forward.

"I can do whatever the fuck I _want_; you're not in charge of whether or not I get laid for the night anymore, so I don't really give a shit what you want me to do."

"I'm not leaving until you hear me out."

"I'll throw you out of the fucking hangar. Think I won't? Did boning Pubes knock something loose in your brain, make you forget what an asshole I am?"

"I didn't 'bone' him, you stupid, stubborn, _asshole _man!"

She is halfway up the boarding ramp before his brain can even entirely register that she has moved, face flushed, and this is probably the most pissed he has ever seen her, including that one time he glued all her paperwork to her desk and spent three hours of sulky detention scraping it off all over again.

She's going to hit him, is his first thought, and an instinctive flinch of a rising block keeps his face out of the danger zone, but maybe this wasn't her intention after all:

She closes the distance between them so fast it reminds him of exactly why she was always top of the class in Unarmed Combat, surrounded by men twice her size and strength, and a hand wrapped up in the collar of his SeeD uniform yanks his face down to fill all the gaps between them, until they are nearly nose to nose, and maybe he was right about her hitting him after all.

She's got that fucking look in her eyes.

"_Listen _to me, Seifer: don't leave like this. If you don't come back…if this is it- do you really want to leave things the way they are? Can you really-"

He cups both his hands over those fingers tangled in his collar, and wrenches them free so hard she stumbles backward, catching herself on the wall at her back. "_I _didn't leave things this way; _you're _the one who had their fucking face all over Pubes-"

"That was a misunderstanding!"

"A fucking _misunderstanding_? What, it wasn't you in the picture? It 'wasn't what it looked like'? I swear to Hyne, if I fucking hear you say that-"

"It was me. What the camera failed to catch was me _pushing him away_. I didn't initiate it. I didn't _want _it-"

A surge climbs his throat and brings heat like fever to his cheeks, and if she fucking thinks he's _this _goddamned stupid-

"Get lost," he snaps. "Pubes probably won't even get mixed up in the fighting; we all know he's going to be less than useless when it comes to killing her, so I'm pretty sure he'll come back all safe and sound for you. Have his babies. Have a nice fucking life; I'm done."

"I'm _not_," she snaps back. "You haven't even given me a _chance _to defend myself- you just leap to conclusions without even thinking about it, without even being _willing _to discuss-"

"What's to discuss? You've had a hard-on for Pubes for years; you kissed him, at least. Who the fuck knows what else has been going on when there's no camera around. I fucking get it- I was the second choice, sloppy leftovers, what the fuck ever. I've got more important things to get all butt-hurt over, Instructor." He hardens his voice into something that is not even remotely close to what he is feeling, and will she just fucking _leave _already; how goddamned long does she expect him to keep it together-

"What do you want me to say?" she asks, bringing one hand up to pinch the bridge of her nose, both eyes shutting softly, pressing, sealing, squeezing tight, until she opens them once more with a look that goes right through his fucking chest. "What is it going to take, to convince you that it's _you_, Seifer, and not him?"

She sounds so fucking tired he just wants to hold her, to be held by her: Quistis Trepe and Seifer Almasy, that was the plan, and fuck Garden and sorceresses and goddamned rule and order and _duty_- fuck Cid and fuck fate and fuck _Matron_- she could have stopped this before it ever even came to this point, before he got hurt, before he got fucking _destroyed_ by that bitch fate and this bitch here in front of him, and _why didn't she love him enough to do that_-

"Not kiss Pubes, maybe? That would have been a start." The anger in his voice is not quite as harsh as he would like it.

Hers is right on the fucking money, though. "I _didn't_-"

He flaps his hand dismissively at her. "It's _done_. It's fucking over; consider yourself paroled, or whatever. Have a nice life, Trepe. I hope your and Pubes' children are all born with birth defects- it's probably a pretty good possibility anyway, with him as the dad."

He turns his back on her with a tightening of his jaw and a hardening of that porous fucking heart, and one foot in front of the other- fucking _march_, soldier- and why in the fuck do they have to be so goddamned _heavy_, sometimes.

"_Seifer_."

He keeps walking, back into the mouth of the ship, over clanking sheet metal beneath his feet and past little winking green irises of lights to either side of him, and his heart cracks all the bones in his chest with each pathetic dying wheeze of its next beat, and he walks on, on, he _walks_, and he is going to _keep _fucking walking, just watch him-

She grabs him by the shoulder, digs her nails into the meat of his delt beneath uneven folds of uniform jacket, and she _wrenches_, so hard he is pitched suddenly sideways into the wall, and now she is fucking _on _him-

He flares both hands instinctively out into guard position, only she's not attacking him: her hands find his cheeks and her lips find his mouth and she fucking _pushes_, and now they are all trembling limbs and shared breaths and rustling clothing in a pile against the wall-

-what the fuck is he _doing_-

He shoves her away, sets her back, but she fucking _clings_, her wrists in his hands and her lips on his neck, and his traitorous fucking heart and his even more traitorous dick are so goddamned _close _to giving in-

"_Stop_," he snarls. "_Stop it_, Quistis."

She peels herself slowly away, and his fingers are still manacles around her fragile bird-bone wrists, and there is one long infinitesimal moment in which he's not sure he can let go.

She jerks them free herself.

She turns away.

He swallows his heart back down into his chest and watches her stride briskly down the ramp into the echoing cement-walled hangar below, and the little slump in her shoulders and the careful way she holds her head high, like it's about to snap off at the fucking neck, makes him go all goddamned hollow inside.

She has lost and he has won and why doesn't he feel more fucking satisfied about this-

He shuts his eyes, huffs a careful calming exhalation: one, two, fucking three, _breathe_, asshole.

He turns.

"Go after her," Squall Leonhart says with no inflection in his voice.

He freezes.

He folds both arms over his chest and looks up with a scowl, and behind him the door to the hangar booms shut with a finality that squeezes a fist shut around his heart, and all the breath in his throat and his chest just _stops_, congeals, and he can't say anything at all.

"She was telling you the truth. It was me, not her. And she pushed me away. I don't care about you, or how you feel, but don't make her miserable; she doesn't deserve it." His throat sucks itself inward, hard. "Go after her."

What is worse: breathless promises he knows he cannot keep, murmured into her hair; a good-bye embrace neither of them wants to break; some meaningful looks and hearts stuffed to the goddamned brim with false fucking hope-

Or this abrupt severance of ties, this letting go: her turning away and him turning away and them both going their own way, separately, permanently, forever- him into old deaths, bypassed time and time again, her into new life-

He brushes past Pubes on his way back up the boarding ramp.

He does not stop walking to lean abruptly up against the wall with his eyes shut, his stomach clenching, unfurling, clenching again, until he is well out of sight within the bowels of the Ragnarok.

* * *

><p>"Ellone? Do you believe me now?<p>

Ellone? Do you believe me? Look- look what I found. See, it was _supposed _to be us- it _was_. This is how it's supposed to go. You can't just go back now, right? You're not really one of them. You understand, Ellone, right? You're not one of _them_. I'm not either, so I think we should stay together. I think it should be us, and my Knight, if he comes back to us, if I can trust him.

Don't you agree? Ellone? You don't still want to go back, do you? They won't _understand_, Ellone. I do. I really, really understand, ok? So you don't have to feel alone anymore. You're not alone. _We're _not alone. They won't let us be, ok?"

* * *

><p><em>The dirt turns to mud beneath his feet, soft marshmallow quicksand, and he sinks down, down, down, and beside him is her ship mast spine, steel, and in front of him is his friend's silk-pillowed bed, permanent, and the mud reaches his knees and crawls up over the caps and makes its slow snake-slithering way up his thighs-<em>

_ He screams he rages he _lunges_-_

_ And she only goes on staring, staring, fucking _staring_, and beneath him this soft marshmallow quicksand flexes its throat shut around his neck-_

_ And he stops. _

_ Autumn rain washes all the make-believe from his friend's cheeks and smears it into diluted pink-blood drips down his chin, and the sky above him fissures, breaks apart, and down tumble steel curves and mirror-polished mercury, and he strains forward, forward _farther, goddammit_-_

_ His hand finds the handle of his weapon as her voice finds the folds of his ear, and he falls back, sinks sinks _sinks_-_

_ "Take it, boy. Take it and hurt them like they did you. That's what you want to do, isn't it? You want them to feel like you. You want them to understand how much they've hurt you. Do it. Take it. Make them see. Make them understand. _Do it_, boy. Boy boy boy boy- that's all you are, isn't it? I thought you'd be a man when you returned to me, but you're still a boy: scared, uncertain. Are you going to step forward? Retreat? Do you remember? Do you remember what you chose, once upon a time?_

_ Choose again, boy. Choose _again."

He is jolted into consciousness by a long earthquake shudder of a jostle and a resounding bang, and above his head blue-glacial canopy shivers, stars-

"What the _fuck _was that-"

The Ragnarok drops.

He clings to his chair and beside him strangers in SeeD uniforms claw up their own, and his stomach fucking rollercoasters, up down, down up, and what the hell is that _fucker's _problem-

"_Wuss_!" he snarls.

Clouds peel back and wisp apart and beneath them Esthar spreads itself out into an entire galaxy of lights and his heart finds the back of his throat and his nails find the marshmallow sponge of the padded arm rests and _fuck _him-

The canopy stars and stars again and finally scrapes itself squealing free-

It is sucked up into autumn skies the color of smoke and now something screams along past metal skin and tick tick ticking clockwork machinery-

The wind shrieks through his hair and adrenaline shrieks down his trembling liquid-kneed legs and beside him the small pig-tailed SeeD with the nervous blue eyes begins to wail incoherently-

He shuts his eyes.

She is the last thing he sees.

* * *

><p>Too hot-<p>

Too _fucking _hot-

What

The

Hell

Is fucking

_Happening-_

Hrk-

_Hrr_-

He can't _breathe_-

Too hot-

Too…_fucking _hot-

Something smells…burning? Burning…_meat_?

Crackling flames in the air and roaring fire in his chest-

His eyes slit…buckled metal…explosion-chewed boot…

Gray autumn skies and chestnut casket top and marshmallow paste in white-cadaver hands-

It…fucking…_hurts_…

Someone holding his head.

Quistis?

He can't _breathe _it _hurts _make it _go away_-

His head in gentle soldier-callused hands and the sky above him turning, turning, turning- which way is fucking up, does she know?- and sizzling air and boiling chest and he lets his head hang limply off to one side and vomits, _heaves_-

"Gotcha'. I gotcha', man. You're ok."

Not Quistis.

Not Quistis after all, he understands.

He remembers lips on his mouth and hands in his hair and serrated pain in his chest and he hurts like a _bitch _and what has he fucking _done_- answer him that, huh, what the _fuck _has he _done_-

"Seifer? You ok? You ok, man? Say something. It's me, dude. It's Zell. You're fine. You're _fine_. I Cured you. You're going to be ok. _Say _something. Seifer? Come on, man, fucking _say _something. It wasn't as bad- it wasn't as bad as he was; you _have _to be ok-"

His voice hisses in his throat and somewhere far out to either side of him his hands twitch and slowly, fucking _slowly_, feeling creeps its way back into his toes and jerks his head in Wuss' sweat-smeared hands.

"What the fuck…what the…_fuck _did you do, Wuss?"

"I don't know what happened. Are you seriously ok, man? Your uniform's ripped all to shit. You had some shrapnel in your side when I drug you out, but I got most of it out and a Cure pretty much sealed everything up. Geez, man, you were _lucky_. Everybody else in the Passenger Room, the whole SeeD team's _dead_, man."

"I _feel_ dead," he croaks, trying to peel apart his gummed-shut eyes. "I feel…hot. What the fuck…what the fuck is that?" He can't open his goddamned eyes.

"You were on fire when I pulled you out. I mean, not like, an _inferno _or something, but your uniform was kind of smoldering, so I stomped it out and then I dragged you out of the wreckage, and I know you're not really s'pposed to move injured people when you're not really sure what kind of injury they have, but everything was just going up and if I left you there you would have burned up too-"

"You fucking…_stomped _on me?"

"Just your _uniform_. I _saved _you. How about a 'thank you' or something?"

"You're the one who…crashed…the fucking ship, asshole. What should I thank you…for? Being…a dumbshit?" His breaths are farther apart now, and each slow blink works a little more at the adhesive between his eyes and the salt-crust in his lashes, and now if he squints just right he can see coils of smoke against sky the same color.

"You're fine," Zell says, and he is almost embarrassed at how much the relief in this dumbfuck's voice warms his whole goddamned chest.

A jagged inhale pieces back together the shards of his own voice, and he breathes once, twice, again, longer this time, just to be sure, and asks: "Are you?"

"Yeah. The cockpit…it was kinda' like one of those car wrecks, you know, where one side gets like _demolished _and everyone on that side dies horribly and then you've got three people on the other side of the car who walk away with a little scratch on the cheek or something. The cockpit took the least damage. Smashed the shit out of the window, but it's mostly intact; I cut myself crawling out, and I think I bruised a couple of ribs or somethin', but mostly, yeah, I'm good. Not, you know, like…" he trails off. There is a hitch in his voice that unsteadies his hands beneath Seifer's head, and he shifts his neck and rips the adhesive from his eyes with one bandage-tear blink that drips warm-salt tears down the side of his nose-

And above him the sky stitches itself back together and now in the air are little salt-white flakes of snow that alight like feathers on Wuss' hair, and he goes on blinking up into that gunmetal sky, wondering if this was how the poor fucker felt when those Galbadian shitstains blew his truck out from underneath him.

His heart convulses, compresses, and when the fuck is it going to stop hurting, thinking about him-

And then that hitch in Wuss' voice catches up with him and now there is a sudden dawning realization inside his chest that pins his heart wriggling against his spine-

Entire SeeD team dead and only Zell Dincht's white-chalk face above him and smoking wreckage around him, twists of half-melted steel teeth, knife-edged, and that burning fucking meat smell-

-marshmallow paste in white-cadaver hands and that hatless unshadowed curve of rain-beaded forehead and how the fuck are his legs even still _working_, right now-

And he swallows left-over bile and feels his stomach slosh, curdle, fasten itself back against his spine, and snow blurs in his eyes and Wuss' hands slip gently along his head, and he just goes on _lying _here, blinking.

Pubes.

Don't tell him the fucker-

Don't tell him he actually goddamned _cares_.

Snatch his woman and get his ass thrown in jail- fucking _twice_- and get the whole goddamned world to lap your lubed fucking asshole just for saving its goddamned ass- _once_- a long time ago and just in general piss him off with your lipstick lesbian fucking face and fucking _of course _he doesn't care-

His heart compresses harder, and he thinks about Squall Leonhart holding back, fumbling a step here, a riposte there, because what it comes down to is neither one of them really wants to kill the other: they just ended up on opposite sides is all, which is really what everyone expected all along, but it doesn't mean anything has to _change_- this is a rivalry, not a death match-

And what it comes down to is Quistis in Pubes' twig-girl arms and a father who loves him, who did not sell him into Garden-shaped shackles without so much as asking his opinion, and he _still _can't quite process a reality where the guy might be dead.

"Pubes-" He stops when Zell clears his throat.

"He's ok. He helped me pull you out of the wreckage, actually. And he was the one who Cured you; had me stock a couple more off him, too, just in case you needed anything else. Some of the radio equipment wasn't too badly damaged, so he walked off a ways to see if he could get some signal. We're way out in the middle of the plains somewhere. He wants to try and get ahold of Laguna and see if he can get someone out here to pick up the bodies and give us a ride back to town." A pause, and another shifting of those hands beneath his head. "You were worried about him, huh?"

"_No_," he snaps.

"He was worried about you. I know you guys pretend like you hate each other and everything, but…you know, once you guys were brothers too. And I don't think you hate each other as much as you want to think. I mean, it's not like he wants to be your best friend or anything, but he was scared when we dug into the passenger room and realized how bad it was. Your seat had some wreckage fall over it and kinda' tent it, which is what saved your ass. Everyone else…Aideen…her fuckin' _head _had been cut off, man." He takes a deep breath. "Look, the thing with Quistis…like, I don't think he was purposefully trying to steal her away or something. It just happened. And from the little he's said about it, I think it just took her completely by surprise, and she didn't return it in any way."

He glares up into the sky while snow melts in his lashes and sensation slowly drips back and back and back into his numb oaken limbs, and his heart twitches a second quivering beat in his throat and another in his leg, and he says nothing.

"Whatever, man. Be that way. Just throw her away even though she loves you and you love her and some people don't even _get _that- some people had it and lost it and you're too _fucking _stupid to even bother to try and hang onto it," Zell snaps.

He lets go.

His head glances off a knee and slides limply to the ground, and this dull thud of a landing sparks white snarls of pain clusters in his head, little exploding stars that spin red constellations across his eyes, and he slithers one elbow stiffly up underneath him, struggling in the dirt-

And Wuss' hands slip themselves underneath his armpits and he is suddenly lifted from boneless prone to upright slump. "Sorry."

He coughs free the clot in his throat. Goddamned leftover puke- that's all it is. "No. It's…uh, ok."

He looks down at the lumps of scar tissue that are his hands, gnarled as old trees. Sometimes he vaguely wonders what the hell they're going to look like when he's forty, provided, of course, he even makes it that long. "Look, Zell…Ellone-"

"I was talking about Squall and Rinoa," Zell cuts him off stiffly, bracing Seifer's back against his stomach. "Think you can stand up?"

"Only one way to find out," he says, and pulls his feet up underneath him one slow straining inch at a time, migraine in his skull and little needle spikes of white-sparking pain in his legs, and if he can just- fucking- get- them- _beneath_- him-

The world kaleidoscopes. "Not yet."

"Ok. Just hold still. You're pretty bashed up, man. Squall and me- man, we thought you'd ate it for sure."

"At least fucking _something _actually turned out in my favor, for once."

"That's not true. I'm holding you in my arms right now, aren't I?"

"Yeah, and could you maybe fucking ease off? I'm pretty sure that's your dick poking me in the back. I know you're sporting a perpetual hard-on for me, but it's courteous to keep that kind of shit to yourself. Just because I understand that I'm irresistible doesn't mean I understand or support your lifestyle."

"Pfft. Whatever, ya' asshole. Just say you're glad to see me and get it over with."

"If this is the part where you lean in to hug me, make sure you adjust your panties real quick- I wouldn't want to get a flash of vagina."

"Kay, well, you're feeling better if you're making cracks about my masckuhlinity."

"It's _masculinity_, dumbshit."

"You Quisty? Gonna' start correcting my grammar?"

"I wouldn't know where the hell to start. Pubes' brat makes more sense on a regular basis than you do, and he communicates largely through shitting himself and blowing spit bubbles."

Zell hauls on his armpits again, and between the two of them they get him swaying back on his feet, one arm over Wuss' shoulders, the other sweeping itself up to press a hand gingerly along his aching side. "Fuck."

"What hurts?"

"Everything except my asshole, so I'll give you and Pubes the benefit of the doubt and assume you didn't take advantage of me while I was unconscious."

"I'd want you to know what was going on. Then I could see the look on your face when you realized you actually liked it."

"Yeah- and then I could see the look on your face when I returned the favor by bending you over a table and ass raping you with Hyperion hard enough to knock out a couple of your teeth. Or, shit, maybe you'd be into that- who the fuck knows." A squint of his eyes brings the smoldering wreckage around him vaguely into focus, and as far as his smudged vision can make out there are only brown-dirt folds of hill that layer and fold and roll over one into the next into the next, and beneath him his knees waver, crumple, and Zell tenses himself to take the brunt of his weight, grunting. "How the hell did we make it into the plains? The last thing I remember is Esthar coming right the fuck at us."

"I managed to steer it out past the city so we wouldn't hit any of the buildings when we went down, because there was really nothing else I could do at that point. Everything was going haywire- I don't know what the hell happened. Some of the techs back at Garden put it through its usual pre-flight check, and I did another one on top of that, just to make sure. The instrument panel just went dead all of a sudden."

"Air travel's not supposed to be doable out here, supposedly because of radio interference or some shit like that, but I thought the Ragnarok was immune to that or whatever."

"It is. We've taken it through here lots of times without a problem. It's meant to fly through pretty much anything."

"And then you take it out for a spin and bust the thing into a million fucking pieces- good job."

"Seriously, I don't know what the hell went wrong. And none of the shields were working, either- I tried to put them up, thinking it would cushion the landing enough to at least keep us all in one piece, or something, you know, and nothin', man. Just dead. I don't know what's going on. We're lucky even three of us made it out."

He looks out across all those layers and folds and rolls of brown-dirt hilltop, and shrugs his arm up a little higher on Wuss' shoulders. "You couldn't have put the goddamned thing down closer to the city, at least? How far out here are we?"

"Dunno. That thing _screams_, man- or, it did, anyway. Like a million miles an hour or something. It goes pretty fast, especially when you're falling. I just did my best to point it away from the city."

"I'm going to take a giant leap of faith here and say all our gear's shit."

"Squall and I pulled some of it out- got the gunblades- but yeah, it's pretty much all smashed to hell or burned."

His sigh hurts his goddamned ribs and stutters the breath in his chest, and he's really starting to regret this whole fucking good guy thing. What the goddamned hell has it even gotten him so far? A neglected dick and a broken fucking heart, and he hasn't even gotten into the really deep shit yet.

"I guess we start walking, then."

* * *

><p>"Ellone? What about…what about sending me into <em>your <em>past? I want to know, kay? I just want to see how it happened. I think it helps, you know? To know you're not the only who's different. And then you don't feel so alone! You're not; remember that, ok? We're both not alone anymore. And that's what's important; what's important isn't them anymore, because they don't care about us anymore.

I know you _think _Zell loves you, Ellone, but a long time ago I used to think the same thing about Squall, and he _didn't_- not enough to save me, and now there's already somebody else, and maybe Zell's already moved on too, you know? So you have to move on too. And even if he hasn't…how do you think he's going to take this? Do you really think he's going to understand? He's going to be afraid, Ellone. They always are. They never _understand_, because they're too busy being afraid of what's different. They _hate _anything that's different. If you go back to him, that's what's going to happen, Ellone. He'll hate you. He'll hate you and you'll be all alone and then you'll be sad, and I don't want you to be sad. We're supposed to be together. If we're together, we won't be alone or sad or have to worry about anyone trying to hurt us, just because we're different. So send me back, ok? I just want to understand you better, so we can help each other. I'm not your enemy, Ellone- it's not me, it's _them_. It's Zell. You can't trust any of them now, you understand that, right? You have a secret, and only I can know your secret. Only I can know your secret, and not care. I won't leave you alone like he will, Ellone."

* * *

><p>The snow comes down harder.<p>

He drops the useless radio from his cold-numb hand and tilts his head to squint contemplatively up into the sky, and for just a moment he is only a lonely unloved six-year-old boy on a sagging paint-smudged front porch, watching winter skies sprinkle salt into the ocean.

Pink tongues between smiling lips and imprints of angels in salted beach sands-

_-squall come on-_

_ -come make angels with us see like this no selphie I said like _this_-_

He smiles faintly.

The autumn wind lifts his hair and these swirling flakes of salt frost his shoulders and burn his cheeks and he looks down at the radio in the shifting plain dust, and behind him lies the Ragnarok, sputtering, smoking, dying, and in front of him lies Esthar city, shining, radiant, alive-

He could make the city by nightfall, if he hadn't let himself get soft behind that desk, if he hadn't let his hands patch themselves slowly over with velvet like rot-

The longer he stays away the more time she has.

But pretty smiling Sis is in her clutches, pretty smiling Sis who played with him when the others grew tired of waiting for him, pretty smiling Sis who loves Zell, who is loved by Zell, who can't be lost when they have already lost so much-

Irvine in his new marble-mirrored box beside Selphie in her old termite-tunneled own, and he can't just _let that go_, doesn't she understand? Maybe he loved her and she loved him, once upon a time, but they are no longer Squall Leonhart the boy and Rinoa Heartilly his pretty pink-cheeked girl: the old man and the monster; this is how the storybooks will remember them, this man and this woman who loved each other, once upon a time.

Matron's stories always ended so differently, you know? It is no wonder Seifer feels cheated, disillusioned; knights are handsome heroes who do not die, who do not hold in their arms the dying princess, gargling her own blood-

He feels cheated too. Cheated, disillusioned, _broken_, and just so _damn angry_: put him down for all these emotions, cranked all the way up, but what _good _does it do? Seifer's snarling resentment; Zell's noisy graveside grief; Quistis' frigid masquerades and messy unravelings, when she thinks no one is watching- none of them change anything.

And so he simply stands and watches the cityscape shift, lights snapping on here, going off over there, flickers of traffic and tiny faraway dots of pixilated pink he thinks might be people-

He stands as the snow comes down and the wind blows harder and the sky goes darker and the radio at his feet lies silently ineffective, and behind him is a faint shout, lifting up at the end, a question, and he turns-

He waves in the gathering dark.

He toes the silently ineffective radio into the dust beneath his boots, and waits.

* * *

><p>"Wait…what's happening? Do you know what's happening? Hello?"<p>

_-rinoa it's ok calm down-_

"But where did she _go_? I can't feel her anymore…or I can…I think…but she's…moving away? Yeah- she's leaving. She's leaving me, isn't she?"

_-yes rinoa she left after she sent you back into her past-_

"But how come she could? Before- before I could sense it when she tried to do that. Why didn't I this time?"

_ -she's pushing her boundaries rinoa she wants out badly enough that she's more scared of not trying to escape than she is of trying to escape and getting caught-_

"So she…she blocked me out? How did she do that? Keep me out of her mind long enough that I couldn't tell what she was going to do?"

_-don't worry rinoa she can't do it for very long you scared her rinoa you shouldn't have sprung things on her so quickly she wasn't ready to hear it-_

"I didn't mean to scare her. I just wanted her to understand…I wanted her to know that we should be _together_, you know? That we were supposed to be. That as long as we had each other, we wouldn't be alone. I just…I don't want to be alone."

_-we know rinoa but you're not we're here you have to keep remembering that ellone will come back to you on her own don't chase her for now let her understand there isn't really a place for her in this world without you ok rinoa she'll understand soon I promise-_

"Ok…ok I will. She'll come back to me, right? I don't _like _hurting people, you know. I didn't want to do that to Balamb…I just…I had to. You understand, right?"

_-yes rinoa ellone will understand too she'll understand why you had to do what you did how the world treats people like us like her she'll see soon don't worry she'll see and she'll come back to you I promise rinoa don't be sad she'll understand better if she sees on her own ok rinoa please don't be sad there's a good little girl-_

* * *

><p>She runs.<p>

She stumbles, falls, crawls on, claws herself over the tops of dunes to slither tumbling down the side-

She can barely see through the snow and the dark and her tears: Esthar's landscape is all blur and smudge and mounded hills of brown scrub salted white-

The wind whistles in her clothes and screams in her ears and she flounders, sinks, pulls herself back up, wipes the smears from her eyes and the dirt from her lips, and she runs again, stumbles again, falls again-

She goes on and on and on like this, until Esthar is folds and folds of hills behind her, until the moon and the snow and the distant light of what she thinks might be flames are the only illumination she can still see, until the wind in her ears drowns the voices in her head-

She runs.

* * *

><p>Squall leads them by the light of his phone, still intact, and Seifer leans his fat ass heavily slanting down across his shoulders, and beneath him his legs cramp, go numb, cramp again, and friggin' <em>hell<em>, he's so tired of walking.

He shifts his friend higher on his shoulders, snow and dirt and tiny picked-clean bones of monsters splintering underneath his boots, and Esthar is still way too damn far away when Squall suddenly stops, phone above his head and a frown between his brows-

"What?" Seifer snaps, his hand fisting against Zell's shoulder, bunching in the material there until he jerks his head to one side to twist it free of his friend's fingers, scowling.

"Watch it, dammit- you're freaking strangling me."

"Quiet," Squall hisses.

For a moment there is only the soft hush of the snow and the howling of the wind and the ticking of the watch on Squall's wrist beneath the cuff of his SeeD uniform, and then, indistinctly, he thinks he hears something else: footsteps in the dust, a broken stride, the thump of something falling, struggling, falling again-

"Shit," he whispers. "There might be Galbadians out here. We're screwed, if it's them. There's only three of us-"

"Thanks for the brilliant fucking observation, Wuss," Seifer replies, shifting in the dirt beside him. "Do Galbadians generally cry like little fucking girls?"

"Yeah: when they have to fight me. Wait, what are you talking about?"

"Listen."

He tips his head, frowning, and ahead of them in the snow and the wind and the spinning, white-powdered dust are the sounds of choked gasps for air, stifled sobs, fingernails scrabbling for purchase, losing it, finding it once more-

He starts forward, Seifer's arm still over his shoulder and Squall's extended out in front of him, phone a flickering blue star in his hand. "Come on, dude, move; it's a girl. You can hear her, too, right? She's probably lost. We can't just leave her wandering around out here- there's monsters and stuff. Maybe some Galbadians camped out here too, waiting for another go at Esthar."

"And Wusses with desperate, unfucked penises."

"That's disgusting, man. I'm trying to be a _gentleman _here-"

"_Quiet_," Squall hisses more sharply, glaring.

Something tops the dune ahead of them, swaying, silhouetted in moonlight and softly blowing salt flakes in the wind, and around the shadowy contour of its unlit face whips chin-length hair, flapping, thrashing, and the shape is just right and his heart rises in his throat and something clenches itself like a hand around his stomach, and he wants so _badly _to hope-

Squall lifts his phone, throwing pale blue shadows across the dirt-

In the sky above them clouds shift, peel themselves apart, drift away on the wind and the moonlight and the softly blowing salt flakes of early winter-

His stomach bottoms out and beneath him his knees twitch, catch, and Seifer's arm across his shoulder slips itself free, and now his friend supports himself on his own, arms folded, head inclined. "Get over there, Wuss. What are you waiting for, you dumbfuck?"

He runs.

* * *

><p>She falls.<p>

She is swept up, held limply swinging in arms that crush from her chest every halting half-breath she tries to draw-

"_Ellone_," he breathes, choking on the word, strangling, and she is released just slightly, crushed again, and she falls again, but into _him_ this time- not dirt or blood or burning bodies in Balamb's gently rustling field, but his chest, broad and hard and warm-

"Are you ok? Are you ok?" he asks, because once is not enough, and his hands lift her face and he kisses her once, twice, forehead, nose; she twists her fingers into his uniform and nods, feels her face shudder, collapse-

"It's ok. It's ok it's ok," he murmurs, "Shhh; shh, Ellone; it's ok. Don't cry? Please don't cry."

She sobs harder.

* * *

><p>He kisses her nose and the angles of her dirt-smudged cheekbones and oh goddamn, oh <em>Hyne<em>, he's so glad; he's so _goddamned _thankful; he holds her tighter and kisses her more, beneath her eyes, across her temples-

"Shh; it's ok. It's ok- I promise." His heart beats between them, hard enough he knows she can feel it in her own chest, and he kisses her hair, her chin, underneath her eyes again, and if he can just stay here like this, forever, he can die happy, he can die this _very second_, content-

* * *

><p>He smiles as he watches.<p>

He's not going to lie: it hurts to see her look up at Wuss the way he wishes Quistis would look up at him, the way she is never going to look at him again- it's a fucking right hook to his gut and his chest, hunching him over just a little, but they just look so goddamned _happy_-

He hasn't seen Zell smile like that for a long time. Tears in his eyes, her face in both hands, and he can't even think of any shit to give the guy, because watching Wuss cry himself fucking dry in Balamb's ashes is still with him sometimes, and he doesn't ever want to see that again.

If she hasn't been taken from him- if she is _here_, alive, in his arms- there's still a miniscule fucking chance at the happy ending for someone, and y'know, the thing is, he doesn't even mind if Wuss gets it instead.

His chest is that fucking warm, watching them embrace, pull back, embrace again, and maybe he's a fucking sap, but if someone gets to be happy, he's real goddamned glad it's Wuss.

* * *

><p>"Quistis? It's…it's Laguna."<p>

She managed a bland smile into her phone, shifting it down between shoulder and neck. "Are Squall and…the rest of the team there?"

A long pause reared her soldier's instincts and put sudden stifling fear in her chest and cotton-wad terror in her mouth. "Laguna?"

"The Ragnarok never made it to Esthar. It went down in the plains a few hours ago; I'm at the site now. We don't know what brought it down. We uh…" He coughed. "We've found…some bodies. They're too badly burned to identify them at the moment, and some of them…some of them aren't in one piece anymore, but…we're uh…Hyne, I'm so sorry, Quistis. It's a mess here. It looks like…it doesn't look like any of them made it. We won't know more until morning, but…I thought…I thought you should know."

She sat with her phone cradled between shoulder and neck while her world folded, folded again, collapsed swaying inward-

The night-shadowed window reflected back her ghostly unsmiling face, and in this mirror-image reverse she watched her fingers tighten, go slack, tighten again-

She shut her eyes.

Her voice barely held itself together. "All right. All…right. I'll check out a car from the garage. I'll be there…I'll be there in a few hours."

She hung up.

She spent a very long time looking out the window.

In the patch of night-gloom just beyond her dorm, the sky outside shed its thin silver-metal skin to usher through the moon, gilding Balamb's feather-ash fields, and she went on simply sitting, barely breathing.


	29. Interlude Thirteen

**A/N: I know you guys deserve a full chapter, but I don't have time to edit sixteen right now. Posting is going to take me just a little bit longer over the next couple of months because I am working on a drawing that I intend to give to my dad as one of his Christmas presents, so I have had to split my time into writing and drawing days. Everything is coming along fine (including the novelization), but proofreading chapters takes me at least an hour and cuts into my writing time quite a bit, so basically what it comes down to is that I've been getting lots of writing done, but not so much editing. (This is good in a way, though, because it means I've got stuff stockpiled.) Once my dad's drawing is done, I'll be able to relax a little and start putting chapters out more regularly once again. And total disclosure: while I love writing and partake of it far too often for it to be considered a healthy way to spend my leisure hours, I do sometimes get lazy about posting, so if you haven't seen an update in a few weeks, there's a good chance that it's due to procrastination, in which case, please do feel free to send me rude PMs about how this story is done and therefore just needs to be goddamned posted, you good-for-nothing lazy sack of shit author. (Just like that.)**

**As always, thanks for reading!**

_Dear Selphie and Irvine,_

_ This letter's kinda' different; I haven't had time to actually sit down and write anything, but I…I kinda' wanted to talk to you guys, you know? So this is all in my head, for now, but sometime when there's not so much crap going on, I'm going to write it all down for real, and put it in that box with all the rest._

_ The box is still underneath your bed, cause I haven't…I haven't been able to go through any of your stuff, even though really it's just taking up room now. It's not like you're ever going to need it again, but I think that's why I can't touch any of it, man- it's like if I do, I have to accept you're _not _coming back, and I know that, I do, but it's like…it's like there's a part of me that won't believe it, even after I sat at your grave for hours, just sitting there, not knowing what the hell to do, because Ellone was gone and you were gone and I hadn't done anything to stop any of it, and sometimes I think maybe I should have. _

_ It's the helplessness that sucks…the not being able to do anything. It's not exactly what we were trained for, you know? I can punch and backfist and kick the shit out of _anything_, anyone- there's no one at Garden who can even take me in hand to hand- and I couldn't _do _anything, you know? Not for either one of you._

_ But what I'm hoping…what I'm hoping is that you're together now, because that would make you both happy, and before you died, Kinneas, I hadn't seen you really, really happy for a long time. Like, sometimes it was there, or it started to be there, and then this look would come over your face and you'd go all quiet and I never knew what to say, so I'd just start yapping on, just to fill the silence, you know? Because I hated the silence, and because you'd smile, or tell me to shut up, and that was a lot better than you just _sitting _there, staring away at something I couldn't see, and I always knew it was _her _you were seeing, and I never knew what to say to that or how to fix it. But maybe now you guys are together, and that's finally made you happy: you're together and you're free, and it's all the rest of us, still back here, who are the ones who have to get by, who have to keep trying and losing and just _struggling_, you know?_

_ Maybe dying is the easy part. Maybe dying is all bright lights and long tunnels and some fluffy clouds in some sky where it's always sunny; it's not like I would know, and I really, really wish you guys hadn't found out either._

_ I miss you. I really, really miss you. _

_ Sometimes it's so damn quiet in the house I can hear my own heart, not like the way you can hear it or feel it after you've been exercising really hard or something, but just its normal beating, you know; just it's normal sound, because it's so quiet there's nothing else to fill the silence except that sound. And then I think about you, and I go downstairs to where your rifle's leaning up against the door, even though I know that's a mistake, even though I don't really wanna' see it- but I _have to_- I have to look at it and I can't stop; sometimes I just sit on the couch for hours, staring at it, you know? Sometimes it's like I've forgotten how to do anything else._

_ But today…today something finally happened to make me forget about you, for a little while: Ellone came back. And I don't know what's going to happen, but for this one moment when I was standing there staring at her, trying to actually understand what I was seeing, trying to make myself believe it wasn't just my eyes playing tricks on me or something…for this one moment I was just so _relieved_, and for this one moment I started to hope again, really hope that maybe someday things would turn out ok, for everyone left. I can't bring you guys back and I'll never stop missing you, but for this one moment I thought maybe I don't have to lose everything, you know? Maybe I won't be alone. Maybe the good guys will win and go on to live happily ever after, and maybe it won't be quite the same, without you guys here, but I think you'd want us to do that. You'd want us all to be happy, and together, just like I hope you guys are right now._

_ And if you're watching…if you're watching, I hope you're not sad, seeing us all down here without you. I hope you really are in a better place. _

_ I hope you guys don't have to worry about anything anymore, up there, and I hope you're never alone, or unhappy, and I hope one day…I hope one day, I get the same thing._

_ But for now, I have to go on living. Sometimes it's hard; sometimes I really hate it, you know? Sometimes I wish it could at least be a little easier, but that's life, isn't that what they say? And I guess the whole thing's kinda' this one big risk, because even for people who aren't like us, someone they love could step off the street corner and get hit by a bus, just like that, tomorrow or the next day or the day after that, and you just never know._

_ But I'm gonna' keep on taking the risk for a while longer, I hope, because it's worth it: it's worth doing it for Ellone and Squall and Quisty and even that big dumb prick Almasy, and for me, because I want to see what comes next._

_ I know you guys will never have a next, and that hurts, thinking about it, but I guess that's part of the risk we take: it's kinda' like we make this deal when we're born, without ever even really realizing it until our time's up one day, but we all gotta' make the deal anyway, and some people's contracts just run out sooner than other ones do. _

_ I gotta' go now. I miss you guys and I love you and don't do anything I wouldn't do, ok?_

_ Love,_

_ Zell_


	30. Chapter Sixteen

**A/N: Credit for the timely posting of this chapter goes to Arisa K, thanks to her...encouragement. (_...oh God she's right behind me...)_**

**I want to add a couple of scenes to chapter seventeen and tack just a teensy bit more onto the epilogue, but we're pretty much at the wire here. One more chapter and an epilogue, and that's it. Huge thanks to you guys for following this so faithfully!**

**Chapter Sixteen**

Presidential Palace

Esthar

He spends a very long time alternating between holding her and barraging her with questions: "Are you ok?", "Are you hurt?", "Do you need anything?"; he wants to know them all, and he fires these demands for answers so rapidly in between squeezing her up against his chest and kissing her forehead that at last Kiros pulls him away with a gentle smile and an even gentler admonition: "Let her go, old man. She needs to breathe."

He can't let her go. Once upon a time he let go of another softly smiling young woman with his heart in her hands, and he never got her back, and this will not happen again, _not again_, not while she is solidly here between his hands, pale and limp and swaying on her feet, but _here_-

He presses her into his chest once more, and for three long moments that stretch and stretch and stretch, as far as he can make them go, there is only her soft breathing in his shirt and her arms around his waist and no space between them, this little pigtailed girl he came so very close to losing-

"Laguna," Kiros interjects again, leaning one hip against the smooth-oiled desk at his back and crossing both arms over his chest. "She's exhausted. Let the poor kid go clean up and go to bed."

She smiles wanly up at him, dirt crinkling along her eyes and twists of artery rumpling up inside of them, and he presses his cheek to her forehead for just one moment more- just _one_, Hyne, just give him a few more seconds- and then he pulls away with a smile of his own and tweaks her nose, and a jerk of his chin brings Zell Dincht instantly off the chair in the corner and to her side.

"Go take her back to her rooms. Make sure she goes to bed,"

"Uncle Laguna, I'm not a child," she says tiredly.

"And hey," he snaps, jabbing a finger at Dincht as the little pointy-haired idiot aims her too eagerly away from him and back toward the door. "Don't touch her. If I hear you laid one finger-"

"_Uncle Laguna_."

"Wuss can barely stand to touch his own dick, let alone persuade other people to do it for him," Seifer offers from the couch, one arm across the back and his right leg crossed loosely at the ankle over the left, eyes shut but that familiar shit-eating smirk on his face.

"All right; both of you, get out of here. But seriously, Dincht: I've got eyes everywhere."

Ellone sighs and rolls her own eyes and leans gratefully into Zell's side as he leads her away by the arm, and for just a moment there is an acid stinging in his eyes that becomes an even more acidic fire in his chest, and he watches them go with a curdling in his stomach that drops him bonelessly back into his chair, arms swinging loosely over the sides.

He tilts himself back in his chair and looks up through his lazy half-lidded eyes, and beside the door stands his son, stiffly at-ease, both hands behind his back, gaze straight ahead, and this sight brings so much hopelessly grateful relief to his chest that for half an eye blink of a second he can barely even breathe.

He still remembers opening the door to these sternly slanting blue eyes and angles of cheekbones caked in blood and plain-dust and tiger stripes of soot-smears, and he remembers catching himself, bolstering his heart and reinforcing his knees and carefully layering over all the cracks in his voice- he remembers surging forward, the instinctive backward flinch of his son, pulling away-

Their relationship is still all frail bird-bone dust in his clumsy oafish hands, and he is so very very afraid of crumbling it further: there will be no embraces between father and son, but he hopes there is enough of his heart in his eyes to make up for that.

There is just enough of a tired, dirt-crusted smile on Squall Leonhart's face to make him think perhaps there is.

On the couch, Almasy bends over to scratch a spot down near his ankle, and the swipes of bruise beneath his eyes are even deeper than when he first stumbled into the office two hours ago, if that is possible. Laguna straightens himself carefully in his chair and clears his throat. "Hey- why don't you go grab a shower and hit the sack? You look like hell, Seifer."

"Thanks. Empathy obviously runs in your family." He stands and bends backward at the waist, cracking something loudly in his spine, and a wince and a corresponding tough-guy squint and he straightens once more, rubbing the back of his neck.

"Guest rooms are on the second floor; pick any one you like. Showers are fully stocked, so you should find soap and towels and all that in any of them."

"What about clothes? Everything sorta' got blown to shit when the Ragnarok went tits up."

"Check the drawers in the dressers; there's usually a couple of clean things, for any guests that forget to bring something to sleep in. You'll probably find a pair of sweatpants or something. Later this afternoon, I'll send one of my aides to pick some stuff up for everyone; it's too early for any of the shops to be open right now."

He leaves without even a good-bye, slamming the door behind him.

"Polite guy," Laguna remarks, leaning back with both arms over his chest.

"He's probably on edge, waiting for Quistis to show up. I overheard Zell telling Ellone something about a fight while I was walking them down here."

"Quistis?" Squall asks, his eyes at last pulling themselves down just far enough to meet Laguna's own.

"Laguna called her when we found the Ragnarok, to let her know what had happened-"

"Oh _shit_!" he blurts, lurching forward in his seat, both hands slapping themselves solidly down on the shining oak-polished desk. "Quistis- _goddammit."_

"What?" Squall demands. His throat moves visibly as he swallows.

"When you got here, I was just so relieved to see all of you, to realize you had Ellone with you- _shit_, I can't believe I did this- that I completely forgot to call Quistis back. She's uh…she's kinda' under the impression you're probably all dead."

"She's going to pull your balls off when she realizes you made her worry for no reason, old man," Kiros remarks casually, studying his nails.

"Yeah, yeah; thanks, you shit. It was an honest mistake- I was thinking about other things. I completely forgot I even called her."

"I'll call her," Squall offers quietly, and there is something in his face that ticks at the edge of Laguna's memory and pulls Kiros' eyebrows together in a frown, and now he tilts himself back once more in his chair and studies his son from underneath his own eyebrows, flicking one finger thoughtfully against the edge of his desk.

"Sure; she'll be glad to hear from you. She's probably almost already here, though, if she left Garden right after she got my cal-"

A shrill beep from the phone on his desk cuts him off mid-sentence, and he leans forward with both hands tented on that mirror-surface wood, frowning.

"President Laguna?"

"Yeah?"

"We just admitted Quistis Trepe downstairs. She's heading to your office now."

"All right. Thanks." He presses thumb and forefinger to the bridge of his nose with a sigh, tipping himself once more backward into the soft marshmallow foam of his swivel chair. "Too late. Hope she's more benevolent than I've heard."

"I'll go meet her," Squall says over his shoulder, and exits just as abruptly as Seifer, the door clicking shut behind him.

Kiros lifts an eyebrow at him.

"Goddamn," Laguna sighs through his teeth, rubbing the bridge of his nose harder. "I think that kid's got a crush on her. Almasy's gonna' tear his head off."

* * *

><p>He swung around the corner with the gil he'd bullied out of Wuss hanging from one hand, damp towel across his shoulders, and now in the hall ahead of him something vaguely human-shaped materialized, shadow-painted, growing larger and lighter and clearer as it rounded the bend opposite him to step right into his path-<p>

He stopped.

She froze.

He squeezed his towel and made the gil in his hand into a thin ink-bleeding cigar of a thing, squished tight between his fingers.

He could hear his fucking heart jackhammering in his chest, filling all the silence between them, and now he watched something in her face change, shift: a crumpling and then a smoothing out-

And now it was her footsteps filling all the silence between them- the soft-meat impact of something slamming into his chest- _her_; her body, in his arms, pressed tight into the groove of his sternum; her sunny lemon balm hair in his nose and her soft-soap skin beneath his hands-

He blinked.

"What the hell are you doing here?"

Her arms cinched themselves tighter, and he was just so fucking _weak_ he could feel himself giving in, leaning forward, relaxing inch by gradual inch into that sunny lemon balm hair and soft-soap skin-

He did not lift his arms. He let them dangle limply swinging along his sides, but his goddamned head came to a natural easy rest against the top of her own, and a slant, a lean, and he'd be right _fucking there_, holding her back, and he wanted so _badly _to do it-

"I thought you were _dead_," she snapped, wrenching herself backward to hold him firmly by both arms, nails digging into the ropes of his forearm muscles, lips pinched, and fuck _him_, he wanted to kiss them. What a goddamned whipped fucking pansy-ass _vagina _he was. "Laguna called me a few hours ago; he said the Ragnarok had crashed out in the plains, that all they had found so far were bodies, too badly burned to be identified…they hadn't yet confirmed anything, but he told me everyone on board was presumed to be dead. Why the hell didn't you-"

"Why are you yelling at me?" he snapped back, yanking his arms out of her hands. "Wuss is the one who was flying the goddamned thing. I know you think everything is my fault, Instructor, but I didn't do anything this time."

"Are Zell and Squall-"

"They're fine. What, you haven't been to see Loverboy yet? I'm sure he could really use some company- you guys have been apart for, what, almost a day now?"

"_Stop it_, Seifer. Maybe I'm not so relieved to find you alive after all, if you're going to keep up this attitude," she said coldly, and turned away.

Something inside of him leaked out all over the floor beneath his bare feet, and he clenched that thin ink-bleeding cigar of a thing tighter, shrugged his towel a little higher, and why couldn't they just cut the fucking _shit_: he still loved her, goddammit, and once upon a time he was pretty sure she had loved him too- maybe still loved him, despite his shithole attitude, despite Pubes, despite the war, despite all his varied and numerous attempts to shit all over her career and every command she had ever issued him, and why did fucking _pride _always have to get in the way-

She paused in the hallway ahead of him and a long hiss of a sigh straightened out her shoulders, and now she pivoted back around toward him on one heel, all the anger gone from her eyes. "I didn't mean that; you know I didn't mean that, Seifer. I drove out here as soon as I got that call. I…was…I was afraid of what I might find, but I had to know."

When she looked at him like that, it cut his fucking legs right out from underneath him, seized up his chest and his faulty ticking heart underneath it, and why had things come down to _this_, when they were so fucking _close_-

He adjusted one hand on his towel and edged a cautious step forward, the floor whispering underneath him and the towel whispering along his shower-wet skin, and a gravelly throat clear lifted her eyes from the floor back up to his own, and suddenly he didn't even have a fucking clue where to start.

"Seifer," she said softly, sliding one foot forward just as cautiously as the tentative creeping of his own. "Can we…can we talk somewhere private, please?"

He tightened his hand around Wuss' gil, and suddenly he was just so fucking _afraid_; he had maybe one more blow left in him, one final hammer swing he could take and keep his damn feet, but from her- from her he just couldn't fucking take anything else, you know?

If she wanted…if she wanted to come clean, to wipe the slate and start all over- he couldn't fucking _do _that; he couldn't sit and listen to her empty out her guilty fucking conscience, because the thing was, what if Wuss was _wrong_- what if he was fucking wrong and Seifer had been sloppy seconds all along; how did he sit there and listen to that, how did he _accept _that with Irvine dead and Raij and Fuj and his fucking mother in the ground and Quistis Trepe the only good thing left in his life-

His throat closed itself over like a fist clamping shut, and he breathed in, _in_, his throat sucking, struggling, and he wasn't at all goddamned sure he wanted to hear anything she had to say.

"Seifer. Please?"

The slight lift at the end of her voice was what undid him; he jerked his head and turned to lead her back down the hall toward his room, not looking back, barely even fucking breathing, his feet shuffling, sticking, popping free with audible little squelches louder than the click click clicking of her boot heels.

* * *

><p>"I haven't…I haven't been honest with you."<p>

He sits down on the edge of his bed and presses his thumb and forefinger to either side of the bridge of his nose, squeezing his eyes shut.

Here it comes, kids: she fucked Squall Leonhart after all, but congratulations, his dick is bigger, so she's crawling back to him after all, mommy issues and everything.

"I shouldn't…I know I shouldn't tell you this, despite what Dr. Kadowaki recommended. I never wanted any secrets between the two of us, but I knew you would hardly react rationally to what she told me, so I never brought it up. But…she was right. You deserve…after everything we've been through together, you deserve to know the potential consequences of your actions. Maybe you don't care anymore-" She swallows audibly, stepping silently along in the deep-pile carpet to the side of the bed, and now it bows beneath her weight, sinks, and he leans forward to press his elbows tightly into the sides of his knees.

He unpeels his hand slowly from his face, blinking up at her. "What don't I care about anymore?"

She says nothing, quietly breathing beside him in the dark.

"You? Maybe I don't care about you anymore?" he snaps. "You know that's fucking bullshit."

The springs inside the bed creak, jump back to upright, and he hears her scuffing around in the carpet again, lemon balm and soap-scent and softly wafting curls of potpourri in the dish on the nightstand all adding themselves to his headache.

"I don't know what to say, to make you believe me. I know you've always been…insecure when it comes to Squall-"

"Fucking _insecure_? It's not _insecurity_, Instructor- it's utter fucking bewilderment over what the hell women see in him. He's an idiot. He treated you like shit, and you fucking _panted _after him-

"A _long time ago_, Seifer. That's the key to all of this: he doesn't mean anything to me _anymore_, not in that way, at least. He's only a friend. And he never…he never meant as much to me as you do."

He swallows thickly and looks down at his hands.

She kneels in front of him in the deep-pile carpet with her palms on his knees and strands of hair loose around her face, and this close to her, he can feel himself crack, waver, and he can just go _fuck _himself, for being so goddamned weak.

He tilts his head up and back, until his forehead grazes hers or hers nudges his, and for one eternal breathless moment she freezes like that, their heads together in the dark and her hands tightening, tightening on his knees, and he closes his eyes and swallows down his fucking heart, and he does not speak until he is certain of his voice. "Let's skip Pubes, for right now. I don't want to talk about that asshole. What the fuck is going on with you? Kadowaki said there were 'matters' I should discuss with you. When she put you into that coma, she said there were things she'd told you to talk over with me, and you refused. What 'things', Quistis? What the fuck is all this shit about there being some kind of connection between you and Rinoa?"

She leans away from him in the dark and slides her hands from his knees to her own, looking down at her fingers. "That's what I've been keeping from you. It doesn't have anything to do with Squall; I was telling the truth about what happened with him. I didn't initiate anything; I didn't _want _anything to happen with him-"

"We're fucking moving past that," he snaps. "What did Dr. Kadowaki tell you? What happened when you were in the infirmary, while I was helping dig fucking kids out of Balamb? Did she figure out what the hell is going on with you?"

"To…a degree." She looks miserably up at him through layers of night-shadow, nervously smoothing loose-swinging bangs with her long white fingers. "I didn't want to tell you. But I've been thinking about it a lot, what she said, about it not being fair, you not knowing what could happen…and then, when I thought…when I thought you were dead…" She glances away toward the nightstand, twisting her fingers together.

"_Quistis_." He grips her chin hard enough to force her gaze back around to his own, scowling. "Quit beating around the goddamned bush."

"Seifer…I'm…you're going to be angry."

"I'm already pissed."

"Even if you believe me, that I never intended for what happened with Squall to happen, if you forgive me…you might not forgive me for keeping this from you. I shouldn't have."

His heart twists inside his chest as her hands twist on her knees and he lets go of her chin, rubbing his scar. "Then why are you telling me now?" he asks numbly, pressing his elbows down harder into his knees.

"Because when I thought…when I thought you might not have made it, I couldn't…I couldn't stand the way things had come to an end, that I'd kept things from you that you had a right to know, that _I _would want to know, if the situation were reversed…" She smoothed one of her eyebrows, leaning farther away from him.

What, does she think he is going to fucking hit her or something?

Nausea builds and churns and layers itself inside his stomach, stuffing him to the fucking brim, and suddenly the bed and this stuffy night-dark room with its potpourri reek can no longer contain him, and he comes to both feet with the towel still over his shoulders and one hand in his hair, and he doesn't even want to fucking _see _her; how the hell _bad _is it, to put that look on her face-

He snaps on the light.

He doesn't want to know. He takes back what he has said, any demands he has made; he _doesn't want to know_-

He wads the towel into a tiny sweat-damp square of a thing, and hurls it across the rumpled bedcovers. "How fucking bad is it?" he snaps, because he can't help himself, because this is fucking _Quistis _and he loves her and he will do goddamned anything for her- he doesn't even give a shit if this makes him unbearably whipped; he just can't keep going with Irvine in a hole and his mother in the one beside him and both of them at odds with one another, when they are supposed to be holding each other up-

"To condense a very long-winded explanation, full of science and medical terminology I'm certain you don't care about, I'm…part sorceress now, after what happened last year in Esthar. Rinoa, most likely unknowingly, tried to pass the succession on to me when she Cured both of us. Because of my overcasting last year, my body has begun to essentially identify magic as an allergen. When Rinoa cast that spell, she simultaneously healed me and caused more damage. The overload apparently produced several tumors-"

"Tumors? Like fucking cancer? You have cancer?" His thundering heart inside his chest moves itself into the side of his neck, and he can hear nothing else now.

"Not exactly. Not in the way you're thinking. Dr. Kadowaki did some research into the sorceresses, to attempt to understand the connection between Rinoa and Ellone, and to hopefully get some sort of handle on my condition, and found a connection between guardian forces and sorceresses. The energy force GFs are comprised of is also present in sorceresses. That's what the tumors were- that energy source. She was able to remove most of them while I was unconscious, but apparently it's…well, warped me on a molecular level, I suppose you could say, the way cancer does. No abilities were passed along to me, thanks to my body's reaction to magic, and I still can't stock any spells or cast them, but internally, there are now some similarities. Dr. Kadowaki warned me that…that when Rinoa is killed…she may again attempt to pass the succession along to me, now that there is this connection between us. There's an infinitesimal chance that she could actually do this," she says, looking down at her fingers once more as her voice drops, and now his heart follows its trajectory, and he spins away to stare chalk-faced into the beveled mirror above the bed, his heart beating loud, loud, louder, a hummingbird fluttering in his wrists, neck, knees-

"There is, however, a chance I could…that I could die. That my body would not be able to take the stress of her trying to pass along the succession. Dr. Kadowaki thinks it's a very small cha-"

He has never heard his voice so small or so tight before. "And you weren't going to tell me this?"

She pauses, and he watches her in the mirror, winding her fingers together, separating them, threading them back together, and she does not look up even once. "No…I wasn't. Not at first. I thought…I thought it would keep you from doing what needed to be done, knowing there was a slight chance that harming Rinoa would harm me as well."

"How long have you known about all this shit?" he asks rigidly.

"Since…since shortly before Irvine's funeral."

That _fucking _long-

Heat climbs his throat and surges into his cheeks and the mirror above the bed is now only a red-smoked blur in his peripheral vision because somewhere in between listening to all this _bullshit _he has squeezed his eyes shut so hard he can see only blasts of red confetti behind his eyes, iridescent rocket powder among midnight stars, flaking down onto upturned faces of awestruck children-

"You were going to let me _kill her_- you were going to let me _fucking kill her when you knew it might kill you too_? What did you fucking expect me to do, when I realized I'd goddamned _offed _you too?"

"Seifer, chances are-"

He whips around to face her, cheeks burning, eyes burning, his whole fucking body on fire, because _how could she not tell him_- how could she let him _get so close_-

"I don't give a _fucking shit _what the _chances are_. Any fucking _chance _is too much, fucking get it? Do you know what I would have fucking done, if I'd ganked her, if I'd helped gank her, and realized I'd just _murdered _you? I'd have _fucking slit my wrists, Quistis_."

All the color bleaches itself from her cheeks and now she stands, hands knotted in front of her, eyes huge in her white-gravestone face, and a step forward eats up enough of the distance in between them to bring her hand softly up against his arm, and he backs away, _jerks _away-

"Seifer, don't say that."

"Don't say what? The fucking truth? I can't believe- I can't believe you were going to just let me fucking _do this_-"

"It's the only way to stop her. The small risk to me is worth it-"

"It's _not _worth it- it's not worth it to _me_-"

"Risk is a part of the career, Seifer. I could easily die on a mission, in combat-"

"You think that's the _same fucking thing_? You think you getting shot by some Galbadian sniper is the same goddamned thing as _me _killing you? You think I could ever fucking _live _with that?"

She sighs and pinches the bridge of her nose, nudging aside her glasses. "Seifer, whatever happens to me is not your fault. It's entirely dependent upon-"

"You think after what just happened to the fucking cowboy, and Matron, and Raij and Fuj…" He is so full of raw pain he can taste it in the back of his throat, bleeding through into his voice. "You think I can just fucking lose you too? And by my own goddamned _hand_?"

"I'm telling you so you will fully understand the potential consequences and be able to deal with them. I'm not telling you so you can back out or attempt to have the entire thing called off. I don't want to do this either; Rinoa is my _friend_, Seifer, but she isn't there anymore-"

"But _you _are. You're not fucking one of them; I don't give a shit what you're like on a 'molecular level' or whatever goddamned shit you were spewing earlier. I _don't care_. We can't take the fucking chance that-"

"We have to," she interrupts quietly, dropping her hand.

"_No_. Just fucking _no_."

She crosses both arms over her chest and looks away from him, toward the window, lids sagging half-shut over her eyes, and he _hates _this fucking look of hers, he goddamned _despises _it: her goddamned _discussion closed _look he remembers from his days as a cadet, and this discussion is _not _closed_, _not by a long fucking shot-

He swallows down the hot nuclear rage in his throat, until he can speak almost normally, and before he can say anything she blows out a sigh between her lips and tilts herself back around toward him, eyes open, fingers convulsing shut around either bicep-

"What other choice do we have?" she asks quietly. "I could die if we _don't _kill her, Seifer. I don't know how much more stress my body can take; by reaching through me, using me as a conduit, Rinoa may very well burn me out. There are only so many times I can survive being subjected to something that my body identifies as a poison. Rinoa is incomprehensibly powerful- my body was not intended to take this kind of a connection, particularly after all that overcasting last year caused so much internal damage." She blinks softly behind her glasses. "So, again: what other choice do we have, Seifer?

Something inside of him bows, fractures, and he drops down onto the bed like he is again his mother's puppet and she has just snipped all his goddamned strings, and this is new: suddenly he doesn't want to fight at all.

He is just too goddamned tired.

His voice is all gravel and rust, when he can speak at last.

"So what you're telling me, is that Irvine's dead, Raij, and Fuj and Matron…all fucking gone…and I might lose you too. And no matter what I do, sit around with my goddamned thumb up my ass, spit that bitch like a fucking pig- it doesn't matter: either way, you could die too." He rubs his hand down his face, swallows around the hot white snarl of smoke-burning pain in his throat, fumbles for something else to say, gives the fuck up, because what the hell else _can _he say: what goddamned more is there to _add_-

She edges a carefully unhurried step toward him. "You don't know how things will turn out, Seifer. Dr. Kadowaki did say it was a very small chance; most likely, I'll be perfectly fine-"

"I don't want a _most fucking likely_," he snarls, and _what does she expect_; what does she want him to _fucking say_: "Sure thing, let's string the cunt up and wait and see, honey"; where in any of this did she picture him reacting _rationally _to the possibility of her death when he just fucking _buried _another friend-

"Do you think _I'm _overjoyed with you running off to confront her, knowing there's a good chance you're not coming home? Of course not, you idiot," she snaps. "But this is what we _do_, Seifer: we take risks. Sometimes they don't pay off the way we hoped they would. Sometimes we die. The orphanage gang is being whittled down to _nothing _in this life, and do you think that makes me _happy_? Do you think I don't want to just walk away from everything, let the world fend for itself, let Rinoa wreak her havoc while we live undisturbed on some deserted island, out of her reach? I do. I _do_, Seifer- you have no idea how much. But we don't have a _choice_: we can't just ignore this and hope it goes away. If we do, it will come back to get us all. We have to end it completely, this time. It has to be _over_, if any of us want any part of a normal, peaceful life."

He swallows and looks down at his hands, and he knows this, he fucking _knows this_, but why the goddamned hell does she have to slap him across the face with it, wield it like a fucking knife before Irvine's death has even patched itself over into a shiny new layer of scar tissue inside him- _why does it have to be them_-

"I think we've fucking sacrificed enough, don't you? What the fuck _else _should we be expected to lose? Fucking _everything_? Lot of goddamned _comfort _that normal, peaceful life is going to be if everyone I give a shit about is fucking _dead_."

"I know," she tells him quietly, crouching down in front of him with both hands on her knees, her eyes softly understanding behind those perfectly slanting glasses, sitting just so on the bridge of her nose. "We're all scared of the same thing, Seifer: none of us wants to be alone. None of us wants to let go of each other, of all those memories from a time when we were just children and nothing else. Sometimes…sometimes I'm so _angry _at the way things turned out, at how much we've had to give up, at how much we still have to give up. Haven't we already given up enough? They took away our childhoods, our entire adolescence: while normal children our age were growing up and falling in love, drinking too much at school dances, learning how to drive, bowling, swimming in the ocean, playing sports, we were learning the ins and outs of the Galbadian political system, should we ever need to infiltrate it; taking anatomy lessons to better apply ourselves in weapons classes, so we could understand how best to quickly murder another human being; crushing on fellow students who might die the next day in a training accident, a SeeD exam, a mission gone wrong…you will never even know how many times I've asked myself why it had to be us, why we couldn't just be left _alone_: we've saved the world once. It's someone else's turn now. It's time for us to grow old, to have children and families of our own, to be _done _with all of this."

"_You _saved the world once," he mumbles toward his hands, draped limply across both knees. "I was the bad guy, remember? Maybe this is supposed to be my fucking _penance _or something."

"You were manipulated and controlled by someone who was a mother figure to you; you loved her and wanted to protect her, and there is _nothing _wrong with that, Seifer."

He inhales shakily and brings one hand up to rub it angrily across his eyes, because the fuckers just won't stop _burning_-

"I can't…I can't even…I can't fucking lose anyone else, ok? I just fucking _can't_."

"You have to be ready to," she says gently, reaching out to tentatively slide her hands across his own. "But not right now. We don't have to fight, Seifer; I don't _want _us to. Not if we don't have very much time left."

He looks up through eyes that can barely even fucking focus, through all the layers of blind-milk haze that veil them all the way down to his goddamned lower lashes.

She presses his face just below her collarbone, resting her chin against the top of his head, her soft breathing in his ear and her even softer lemon-balm hair clouding his face, and he is _not _fucking risking this, no matter what kind of goddamned shit she spews about just goddamned accepting that the world sucks hardest of all for people like them and there's not a fucking thing they can do about it.

There is always something that can be done about it. He is not some impotent little _fuck_: He is Seifer Almasy, goddammit. _He _decides how his life will go; _he _does the goddamned _ordering around _here; _he _says fuck what is _supposed to be_-

It's all about carving out your own path in life, even if you've gotta' use a fucking chainsaw to cut your way through.

He shakes her off.

"Get out," he says calmly.

"Seifer-"

"I said _get the fuck out_. I don't want to talk to you right now."

She stands quietly in front of him for a moment, looking hurt, and he's not going to let that bother him right now: he's got more important things to concern himself with.

She leaves.

He waits three minutes, making his hands into fists, flaring them back open, sweat leaking down his neck and between his fingers and down the snaking blonde fuzz of the hair that terminates at the waistband of his pants, long enough to make sure she is gone, to make sure she is not going to follow him the second he steps foot outside his room, and then he moves.

He is ending this. And her goddamned stupid fucking _martyr _ass is not going to die.

* * *

><p>He blinked stupidly.<p>

He opened his mouth, shut it, opened it once more, blinked stupidly again.

"Did you _hear what I said_?" Seifer snapped.

He rubbed the rough keloid edges of his forehead scar, frowning. "I heard you."

"Then you get that the original plan is out. Look, Pubes, I know that you want to bone Quistis. Let's let that go for right now, just this once. I'll kill you later. But since you can't risk giving up two women who have, at some point in time, wanted to bone you- because who the fuck knows when another one is going to come along- then you also get why we can't kill Rinoa. She says it's a small chance she could die: I'm not willing to take that chance. _Any _chance."

He sagged tiredly back against the wall, rubbing his scar again, something cold and bleak and resigned gathering itself into a tight hard knot inside his stomach. "Quistis is right: we don't have another choice. Even if it means risking her. Like she already pointed out, Rinoa could kill her simply by continuing to use her as a conduit, or whatever it is exactly that she's doing. There's probably a greater risk to Quistis if Rinoa isn't stopped."

"I didn't say we weren't going to stop her- we just cant kill her."

"And how do you expect to stop her without killing her? We don't even know if we can _kill _her; we're not going to rein her in with a non-lethal solution."

"What happened to the Sorceress Memorial when she busted out of it?"

Squall blinked again. "Laguna sent some people up to see exactly how much damage had been done to the Lunar Base. It's extensive, but not as bad as the first time, considering it was completely destroyed once. Some of the scientists on the team recovered the Memorial while they were there. It's damaged."

"How badly? Can it be repaired?"

"I don't know. What would it matter? She broke out of it the first time- do you really think it's going to hold her any better a second time?"

Seifer swung one hand up to rub his own scar, a natural imitation of his own gesture that made him frown. It bothered him how similar they sometimes were. "The Memorial freezes whoever is locked away in it in whatever state they're in when they're shoved into the thing, right?"

"Yes," he replied, frowning harder.

"So what if she's severely injured when we shove her ass in there: too weak to use her powers to bust out, but not dead, so not putting Quistis at risk? If it happens right when she's pushed inside the thing, she won't have time to heal herself before she's frozen."

"How are you going to get her in there? She isn't going to just step back inside it."

"Lure the bitch to wherever it's being stored, stab her, shoot her, whatever, and then pull her in myself if I have to."

That cold bleak resignation inside of him tightened into a fist. "Then you'd be sealed up with her, Seifer. _Forever_."

"Yeah, thanks, Pubes: I get that," he said without blinking. "Someone's gotta' do it, right? Keep her there? Make sure she doesn't get out before we seal her inside? And let's be honest here: your pre-pubescent balls aren't gonna' let you do it. I'm the only one with a big enough sack to go through with it. I'll get her in there. All you've gotta' do is push the button."

* * *

><p>He tucked the covers gently in around her, folding them over at her chest. "Are you ok? Do you need food or something or like something to drink or whatever- I can go get you something, Ellone: just ask. I'll get you whatever you need."<p>

She laid her stark white hands down on the soft mountain mound of blankets over her chest, and shook her head tiredly. "I'm fine. I don't need anything, Zell. Thank you." She smiled just faintly.

"Ok." He brushed a strand of fresh shower-damp hair behind her ear, securing it there. "I'll stay here tonight, ok? And if you need anything, then you can just wake me up- I don't care." He probably wouldn't be sleeping much at all, anyway: watching her face in the dim blind-filtered moonlight through the window was a crapton more important to him than eight recommended hours, because he still could barely even _believe _she was here, breathing softly into the hand he slid around to cup her face, blinking even more softly up at him, her lackluster eyes in her white-bone face smudged with half-circles of midnight mottled bruise, and it didn't even matter to him, if she was scratched and pale and makeupless in her too-large sweats beneath ironed-stiff sheets, because she was _here_, _finally_.

He gave her back her faint tentative smile, and leaned down to kiss her, resting his forehead against hers for just a moment. "I won't let anything happen to you again, Ellone, ok? So you can go to sleep and not worry about anything or have nightmares, or wake up scared, because you're back and I promise- I really, really _promise_, Ellone- that you're safe if I'm here. I won't let her take you again because I missed you so much and like every _day _I thought about you, wondering if you were safe and trying to figure out where the hell she could have taken you because I didn't want you to be stuck all alone with her, not like that, and I was going to do anything it took to get you back-"

She slanted her finger out to rest it lightly against his yammering blabbermouth lips, and that translucent ghost of a smile crept its slow silent way across her own lips once more. "I know; what happened wasn't you fault, ok? Don't feel bad. I know you were looking for me." She brushed her other hand softly across his hair and down the side of his cheek. "I know you did everything you could, ok?"

He closed his eyes and leaned into her hand, his throat aching. "Yeah, but it wasn't enough. We couldn't find you, and then she showed up in Balamb, and she…and I _still _couldn't save you, and Irvine-"

"I know," she said hoarsely, voice full of tears. "I saw."

"I'm really sorry I didn't-"

"Zell-" She stopped his mouth again with a frail white finger, brushing strands of wayward bang from his eyes. "Don't. Please? Don't blame yourself. The only one at fault is the monster controlling Rinoa- no one could have stopped her. You don't know…you haven't been with her the way I have, seen what I have…but there was nothing…there was nothing anyone could have done. Not you. Not Seifer, Squall, Quistis…not an entire squad of SeeDs. What happened to Balamb still would have happened. Ok? So don't blame yourself for something you couldn't have done anything about. Irvine wouldn't have wanted you to do that." She smiled up at him, wet-eyed, lips trembling around the corners, and she was trying so _hard _it broke his freaking heart. "And you know what I think? I think he's with Selphie, and he's happy, and he wouldn't want us to be sad about that."

She pulled her hand away from his cheek and the other from his lips and leaned back into her pillows, her thin bird-bone wrists blending into the sheets underneath her, and he blinked, once, twice, three times, long enough to wipe all the moisture from his eyes and the trembling from his hands, and a forward lean brought him close enough to kiss her forehead again, his lips lingering on her cold concern-crinkled brow. "I'm gonna' let you go to sleep, ok? But I'll be on the chair in the corner over there, ok? So if you need anything, just like yell my name or throw something or whatever you have to do to wake me up, I don't care-"

"Actually," she interrupted softly, not looking at him, "could you turn out the light…and come lay down with me for a while? I have something I need to tell you."

He watched her throat work, pulse, stick on something hard, and inside his chest his heart shrank itself down into a tiny clenched fist of a thing, burning. "Sure," he said brightly, turning away from her with his aching plastic smile stretching his lips too tight at the corners.

She stared up at him in the dark, blinking softly, smiling even more softly, and the thing was he didn't _want _to know: he didn't want to know anything except she was safe and she loved him and that was the way it was going to stay, that was the way it was going to _be_, for the rest of their lives, and he didn't want to _know_ if she had any information that would lead him to believe differently- please just let him _pretend_-

He slid underneath the sheets beside her warm shower-slick body, and in the thin sliver of space between them her hand crept, stopped, crawled slowly forward again, wound itself shaking around his own.

She rested her chin lightly on the edge of his collarbone, kissed the side of his neck, and now he turned over onto a hip, draped his arm across her own, and she just looked so _scared_- what the hell could frighten her that badly, after Rinoa-

"What's wrong, Ellone?" he asked quietly, sliding his thumb softly down the curve of her shoulder and over the subtle swell of her bicep.

"Zell…I'm not…I don't even know how to…" She stopped, squeezed her eyes shut, opened them full of tears.

"Hey- it's ok. You're going to be fine, Ellone, I promise-"

She thrust her fingers into his hair and kissed him.

He flinched back just slightly in momentary surprise, felt his dick twitch against his thigh, tried to shift his hips subtly away from her own- what was he, a fucking _pervert_, getting worked up when she was tired and hurt and _traumatized_- what kind of sick freak _was _he-

"Don't," she murmured against his mouth. "It's ok, all right, Zell? I'd rather…I'd rather do this than sleep, right now." She let go of the side of his head with one hand and set it tentatively down against his hip, slanting the front of his body back into her own. "I just…I just want us to get to be together, for a little while. You'll have to leave soon, to go look for her…and I don't know if you're going to come back; I hate just lying here worrying about that…it's all I can think about, Zell, and I just want to…I just want to not think for a little while, ok?" She moved against him in the dark, the long dry scratch of her worn-thin pajama bottoms against his burn-frayed uniform pants, and he was trying to be a gentleman here, but give a guy a break: she had her hand groping softly down between their bodies now, and a shy exploratory squeeze and say freaking good-bye to all that gentleman crap-

He hissed into her open mouth, flicked his tongue tentatively out to touch, tangle, wrap itself up in her own, and now she hooked a thumb over the waistband of his pants, worked them down over the knots of his hipbones-

"Wait. Ellone, wait," he gasped.

He could barely even _think_, with her hand still there-

She kissed his bottom lip, moved her mouth to the soft sensitive indentation between throat and collarbone, and he twitched again, hissed again-

"What?" she asked, staring up at him through long thick lashes half an inch from his own, her palm sliding down over the front of his pants, fingers hesitating, cupping, shorting out his brain as he tried to re-process whatever thought he'd just lost.

"Uh…unh…uh you had…you said you had to…tell me something, right?"

She faltered, stopped rubbing, laid her head down on the pillow beside his own, slipped her fingers over the hand he had in a white-knuckled clench on her hip, and her smile…man, her _smile_: he'd missed it so much- he thought he was never going to see it again, y'know? It had kept him up all night sometimes, wondering that, his heart this little bile-slick boulder in his throat, and seeing it now just _choked _him, and maybe he was just a little chicken-hearted wuss after all, but how could he _not _be scared, with this at stake, these kind corner-crinkled eyes and this smoothly unscarred hand over his callus-knobbed own: how the hell could he be expected to give this up, all because of some stupid _expectations_, some duty he didn't give a crap about anymore- _fuck _duty- he just wanted to _be with her_, and what was so damn _wrong _with that?

"I love you," she whispered, brushing her hand across his cheek, letting it slither down over his tattoo to the curve of his neck, the slope of his shoulder.

Something swelled in his chest, blocked off his throat, and he coughed raggedly into the pillow beneath his head. "That's what you needed to tell me?"

"It's one thing," she said.

He cupped her face shyly, kissed her even more shyly, pressed himself unconsciously against her as she deepened it-

* * *

><p>Her thumb hooks itself back into the waistband of his sand-blasted pants, still stained in blood and sweat he has not yet had time to shower off, and he lifts his hip just enough for her to work them down to the knees, and now her fingers manacle his wrists, and she moves his hands down to her own waistband, curls them gently between soft-velvet skin and cotton-cloud material, still warm from her shower-<p>

He rolls her onto her back, buries his face in her neck, slides her pants carefully down over her thighs-

She kicks them off before he reaches her knees, fumbles for the buttons down the front of his uniform, and now her hands find the bare skin underneath, skim themselves over his nipples, and he jerks against her, shakily undoes the first two buttons on her own top, lets himself cautiously feel first one breast and then the other-

"Um," she pants faintly, cupping his jaw line in both of her hands, arching underneath him, and oh _shit_, she just rammed her crotch into something that hasn't had a crotch rammed into it in a very long time-

"What?" he asks breathlessly, stopping. "Are you ok?"

"Yes. But…would you…" He watches her go red in the dark, fever flush in her cheeks that mottles away all the white-cadaver pallor in her face.

"What?"

She pulls his face down into her bare breasts, brushes his lips across one of the cold-pebbled peaks of her nipples, and he's not too much of a moron to get the hint.

He can feel her squirming underneath him as he works one into his mouth, her hands groping in between them, and now down come his boxers and up come her hips, and suddenly he is inside her.

Shit _shit_- he wishes she wouldn't- oh Hyne…she can't…she can't tighten up like that- he's only done this once, and it's not like he's really got a good feel for this whole self-control thing-

She thrusts hard, both arms around his neck and her face tucked into the crook between shoulder and throat, and something inside of him tightens already; he clamps down on the urge, presses his lips into her soft peach-scented hair, and a sharp cry and a stiffening underneath him and he pumps hard, once, twice, and she cries out again-

He's halfway through his third stroke when he goes, and he pushes himself all the way inside mid-orgasm, slick warmth throbbing around him so hard he can't even move: he can only lie there on top of her, holding on, emptying himself, breathing her soft-peach hair and her even softer coconut skin, and now there is only the harsh asthmatic wheeze of their breathing in the dark.

He kisses the top of her head and pulls out, reaching for his pants and boxers where they puddle around his knees.

She is crying.

His heart smokes, burns itself into a pile of ash inside his chest, and he can only sit here helplessly with his hands in fists on his knees as she re-dresses herself, wiping her eyes.

"Whoa- shh, shh, Ellone- I'm sorry. Did I hurt you? Shit; I'm sorry. I'm really sorry. I didn't mean to. Ellone? Uh…was I like really bad or something? I'm-"

She hiccups, does up the top button of her shirt with shaking fingers. "It wasn't you, Zell. It's me. I shouldn't have done that, not without…not without telling you first, because I know you'll feel differently about me afterward, and you wouldn't have done that if you knew…" She hiccups again, wipes her nose, squeezes her eyes shut and leans her head back against the mound of pillows they have rumpled into a messy pile.

The pile of ash inside his chest solidifies, becomes stone, and he can barely even swallow around the fragments of it that work their way into his throat. "What are you talking about?"

She does not look at him. "Rinoa told me something…what I was going to tell you earlier…but then I _couldn't_, Zell. I just wanted you to touch me again before you knew, but I shouldn't have done that, and I'm sorry. I should have told you from the beginning."

"_What_?" he croaks, his stomach all acid bile and cold-stone heart, and what is so bad that she can't just spit it out, that she thinks it would make him just suddenly stop feeling for her, this woman he's pretty sure he is going to love for the rest of his life, however long that is.

"The reason why I can see into people's pasts…the reason why I'm so affected by Rinoa, why I can hear her…I'm not…I'm not _normal_, Zell. That's not normal."

He wrinkles up his forehead, scratching at the back of his neck. "I knew all of that before we…uh…slapped fuzzies…uh…sorry…that was something Seifer said one time, but he's a disgusting asshole and I shouldn't have repeated that in front of you, Ellone; he's gross and that's not how I talk about it to my friends, I swear! Not that I really talked about it the first time we did…I mean, like, they _knew_- Seifer said he could tell because I was swaggering around or some crap like that, which I _wasn't_, but-"

"Zell," she cuts in, peeling her hand away from her mouth, opening it just slightly, pressing the soft shower-gel skin of her knuckles back into her lips. "It's…it's more than that. It's about…it's about how I can do all that stuff."

"That's just the way you are, Ellone. It's ok- I don't care. It doesn't matter to me."

"It might," she whispers, pushing the heel of one hand hard into the socket of her right eye. "Zell…I was _made_."

He blinks. Shifts his fists on his knees, feels his cold-stone heart in his stomach slowly thaw just a little, become buoyant again, and maybe he's just stupid after all, but he's really not seeing the problem here. "Uh…so was I, Ellone. So was everyone. Did Laguna…uh… he didn't have the 'where babies come' from talk with you?"

Her laugh is a strangled aspiration of a thing. "I was _made_, Zell. In a lab. By Odine. As an experiment. That probably…by most people's terms…that probably makes me not even completely _human_. Before Adel, way back when he first stumbled on some books about sorceresses, he started…he started experimenting in his lab, thinking that maybe he could _create_ one, that it would be this huge scientific feat, that he could create one he could control, so he could study it. He could never figure out how to do that. But he started playing around with…with gene splicing or something- I couldn't understand all the terminology he used. But what he made, eventually, was me. I was supposed to be…basically a companion for the sorceresses. When Adel…when Adel came, he helped her find me. I didn't even know that until recently. But he helped her so that he could study us together, so he could make some kind of scientific _breakthrough_-" She lowers her hand.

He cannot stop blinking.

"Zell," she says softly, her voice fragmenting, and now he watches her throat seize up, and she cannot say anything else. He watches her mouth open, shut, shut, open, like it _wants _to, like there is more of this confession to vomit up, babble out, but what comes out into the cold stiff silence between them is nothing, is only a couple of soft breaths that hitch toward sobs, and what does she expect him to say- why the hell is she looking at him like that- it _pisses _him off-

"You think that changes things?" he asks hoarsely.

"What?" She takes her hand away from her mouth for good this time.

"You think…you think _I'd_…look down on you? Think you weren't…weren't one of us? That guy's a jerk. He's an _asshole_- I'm _glad _he's dead. I _hate _what he did to you, Ellone- sometimes…sometimes I wish it was me that had killed him. Maybe that's bad, maybe I shouldn't say things like that, but it's true. And now it turns out that he's been hurting you even longer than we knew, and I-" He could rip him apart with his bare _hands_, if the guy were still around and kicking-

"But you really…" A hand squeezes itself shut around his throat. "You really thought I would…that I wouldn't feel like this about you anymore? It's not _your _fault what he did."

"I don't even know what I _am_."

"You're Ellone." He squeezes his hands tighter on top of his knees. "You're Ellone, and that's it, and wherever you came from doesn't really matter- you're still Ellone and I'm still me, and I don't give a _crap_, and I still love you."

* * *

><p>He is so very, very earnest.<p>

She feels her chest warm, become all hot-liquid relief beneath slightly askew cotton lapels, and she wipes her eyes one last time, and she cannot stop smiling at his bed-ruffled hair, even more wildly spiked than usual. "You really don't-"

"I _don't care_. I don't care if he made you for them- no matter what they're like, you're still the best person I've ever known, and that's the only thing _anyone _should give a shit about, not where you came from or what you were supposed to be used for, and I'll punch anyone in the face who tries to be an asshole about it, Ellone, I promise-"

She loops her arms around his neck and buries her face in his chest, and now his head comes down on top of her own, sandpaper cheek to soft-silk hair, and for just this one moment, strong chest and stronger arms and gentle huffs of breath against the curve of her skull, there is a hint of a smile in her voice. "I don't need you to beat anyone up, Zell. It's ok. But…thank you. It's…I'm really glad…I'm really glad you'd be willing to stick up for me."

"I wouldn't let anyone say _shit_, Ellone, and what are they going to do about it- I can beat anyone in Garden in hand to hand- I'll take _anyone _on and there's nothing they can do about it-"

She smiles into his chest, gripping this moment in both hands and holding on tight, tighter, until every muscle in her body aches with the effort, and it is enough, just for now, to be here with him, on this bed in his arms with his soft breath in her hair and his shy lips against her forehead, and she does not ask him _what comes next _or _what will we do when it does_ but only goes on holding and being held by him, breathing quietly against his warm solid chest.

She cannot think about what will come after this or what role she is going to play in it or whether he will even survive it, because for right now he is _here_, and that is just going to have to be good enough for her.

* * *

><p>The thing about choosing to die is all the pressure it takes off your shoulders.<p>

No more planning and agonizing and hemming and hawing over how you're going to pull your ass out of the fire-

All there is now is the fire and your ass right in the middle of it, skin and sinew and bone getting steamed away into nothing, and when the flames are that fucking hot, it's time to just say screw it and let go: there's the cliff, here's your foot, say good-bye and take the last step forward, asshole.

Life is all about that cliff and the foot hovering out over the side of it, anyway: every day is another fucking cliff, and you can either huddle bat-shit terrified at the very edge of it, or hurl yourself laughing over the side, and he never was a fucking coward, whatever else you could say about him.

Fuck the sheep and bring on the freefall, because he sure as fuck isn't sitting around with his thumb up his ass, just watching his life slide and slither and drain away.

Or, more importantly, he sure as fuck isn't sitting around with his thumb up his ass, just watching _Quistis' _life slide and slither and drain away.

Once upon a time, he wasn't afraid to die, and then along came Quistis Trepe, Instructor no. 14, perpetual fucking stick in his eye and tingle in his pants, and suddenly he was.

And he still is, if you want to know the truth.

But he is more afraid of her dying. And after all, it's not like he believes in something beyond all this: if he is lucky, death is just an eternal black void where he does not exist, where he does not _feel_, no shining lights or seventy-two virgins or whatever the fuck it is some people have convinced themselves is waiting for them, so there will also be no missing her, no longing after her raspberry-gloss lips and her blue-ice eyes, sharp as knives or soft as her hair tangled around his arm in the morning, and really, what's so fucking hard about that? She is the one who will be left behind, but forget that: she'll get over him. She is a lot less fragile than him, thanks to mommy dearest.

It is the now that is hardest, this silent moment between decision and action, just him and this ceiling and these hands locked behind his head, all weighted down with all the things they are never going to do.

But forget that too. He's made his choice, and if she's not here, all of those dreams mean shit to him anyway. Better that he not be here, and let her carry on those dreams with someone else. Even…even fucking Pubes, if that's what makes her happy.

He wants her to be happy.

When he was a kid, fresh out of mommy and daddy's loving arms and just getting accustomed to Matron's own, there was this little blue-eyed girl who showed up just a few weeks after him, maybe a month, pretty as one of the princesses in the stories Matron always used to read him before bed, and five years old and still years away from figuring out the wobbly little thing between his legs was good for a lot more than just taking a piss, he fell fucking hard.

He brought her flowers from Matron's garden (blamed it on the dog, or the crybaby new kid who still crapped his pants, but it's always the though that counts, right?); scoured the beach for interesting shells or rocks or whatever the hell else he thought might interest a princess; practiced his swordsmanship on the dog, the crybaby new kid, trees, and once (and only once) the cup of morning coffee in Cid's hand.

And then he figured out what an imperious little bitch she was, that girls had cooties, and that pushing her around was a hell of a lot more interesting (and resulted in a hell of a lot more attention) than trying to impress her.

She always had this one particular look, though, when she was sad or disappointed or scared, that just made him want to wipe it all _away_, to take back whatever the fuck it was he had just done, and something about that look hounded him all the way into puberty, long after she forgot about him and decided Squall McEmoface Leonhart was her entire goddamned world; it didn't stop him from hurting or disappointing her or severely fucking up her day in as many creative ways possible, but it did make him feel like shit, which pissed him off like nothing else, because what the hell was up _his _conscience's ass, when she barely even had a glance to spare him between all her moony-eyed looks at that bland little fuck?

And then one day the little boy who loved her came back, and maybe that wasn't such a bad thing after all, because at least it meant his mother hadn't destroyed the little shit. Warped, damaged, severely twisted- check the 'yes' box on all of these, but he was still alive after all, and he still loved that imperious blue-eyed bitch.

So maybe, what had been going on all these years and years of torment and detention and deliberate marks to her record, was that the little boy had been there all along, had loved her all along, and he'd just forgotten for a while: only fair, since she had forgotten his entire _fucking existence_.

And what had mattered to him, even back then, was making her happy, and he'd known he couldn't do that, known it wasn't going to be him that put the smile on her face or the light in her eyes, so he'd simply gone the other way: make her as unhappy as possible, and you could pretend, for a little while, that if you really wanted to, you could make her just as equally happy- you just chose not to.

Fucked logic, but he always was an arrogant shithead.

Tonight, he is going to let Ellone and Zell bone their little hearts out, Pubes mope around in a corner somewhere, cutting himself, or whatever it is he does when he's not masterbating to gay porn-

And tomorrow-

Tomorrow it's fucking showtime.

Tomorrow he will set into motion things that cannot be undone, and maybe he doesn't have the whole ending written yet, but he's got a pretty good idea of the basic outline.

Happy endings are for fairy tales and chick flicks and idiots who don't know any better: call this one bittersweet.

But at least there's going to be one hell of an exit scene.

**A/N: Oh, Seifer. But we all something like this coming, didn't we?**


	31. Chapter Seventeen

**A/N: Last chapter. I'm posting the epilogue with this, so I'll include my big long thanks-for-sticking-with-this-shit-for-so-long author's note at the end of the epilogue. As for the Time Compression shit, DON'T ASK. I don't know. I really don't understand anything about all of this shit, but I'm pretty sure Square didn't either, so fuck them if they think I should have to be logical about it.**

**Chapter Seventeen**

Esthar

Presidential Palace

"So if they've been working on it for a few weeks, is it almost ready to go?"

"I think so- they were using it more as an experiment than anything, seeing if they could increase the sort of 'force field' -or whatever you want to call it- around the thing, make it stronger. I don't think they have a whole lot of hope of actually using it again, after everything that's happened. Scientists just want to push the envelope, see what they can make bigger and better and more expensive than the last thing they did."

"Do you think…what Seifer's suggesting could actually work?"

"Of course it will, Pubes- you forget how fucking smart I am, because I never bothered to turn in my homework. Actually doing class assignments was for losers who couldn't get laid."

"It's a good idea, I think, but there's a real small window of opportunity here, with what you're talking about. You have to hurt her badly enough that she can't defend herself, and then get her back into the Memorial before she can either heal herself, or realize she's not going to make it and try to pass the Succession along."

"I can do that."

"Without getting yourself killed?"

"That's not important. The goal here isn't to keep me safe- the goal here is to get it fucking done, however we can. Don't pretend you give a shit, anyway."

"Does Quistis know about any of this?"

"No."

"She knows I like to do stupid, flashy things. She'll figure it out when she only has Pubes' dick to come home to, and she realizes how much she misses having a real man around."

"So you're just giving up? Not planning on coming home at all? What about Quistis? What about how _she's _going to feel-"

"Son…Squall."

"She'll just have to fucking _deal _with it. What's more important is that she's safe. Beyond that, the shit's just going to have to hit the fan. You're on janitor duty, Pubes."

"And what if _I _don't make it out?"

"Squall-"

"You will. You think you wouldn't be dead already, if she didn't have some kind of soft spot for you? There's always some part of her that holds back, that saves you at the last minute, which means you get to be the bait, and I get to twist the knife in her back. Your old man's right- we're going to have to do it fast, if we don't want to give her enough time to heal or figure out what we're doing and stop us. Someone's got to be outside, to activate the controls. Someone's got to be inside. It's as simple as that."

"And you don't think I wouldn't be the better option to lure her into the Memorial?"

"No. All her attention has to be on you; I'll hit her from behind. If she knows I'm there, we're fucked. I can't take her on face-to-face."

"You originally had a whole SeeD team devoted to bringing her down- do you really think that just the two of you can do it?"

"I'm worth a whole SeeD team. Besides, who else are we going to bring? Quistis? She's pretty much useless around magic right now, especially that much magic. Wuss will just blab the whole plan, and she'll try and come along anyway, if she knows what we're doing."

"You still have to find her. You don't know where she is."

"We found Ellone out on the Plains. Rinoa probably wasn't far from her- and I was thinking, and you know how the Ragnarok crashed, even though it's supposed to be able to fly out here, even though other air traffic can't because of the radio signal interference, or whatever the fuck is exactly wrong with this place? That radio signal interference has something to do with sorceresses or whatever, right?"

"We think so."

"Well, Rinoa's more powerful than any of them, after whatever the fuck it was Odine did to her. What if she was nearby when we were flying over the Plains and she's just so powerful even the Ragnarok's systems couldn't stand up to her?"

"It's a theory. You might be right. I've got some people working on it at the moment, but we might never know for sure what brought it down."

"Either way, if Ellone's here, she's probably somewhere nearby. After all the shit that bitch put her through, she's obviously important to Rinoa, has some kind of connection with her. If she's here, Rinoa's probably not far."

"And what are you going to do with the Memorial?"

"Well, the whole outer space thing hasn't really worked out real fucking well up until now. There's only one place no one can access it."

"Time Compression."

"Your brain really is bigger than your penis, Pubes. Not that that's hard. But, yeah: only Ellone can access Time Compression, right? Except for the sorceresses, and Rinoa's the last one. So you seal me into the Memorial with her, and then Ellone boots us all into Time Compression, and you shove the thing off a fucking cliff or whatever. Rinoa's trapped for all eternity with her loyal knight, blah, blah, happy fucking days for all."

"Rinoa has to be the one to actually cast the spell, though. As far as we know, Ellone can't actually cast the spell to start Time Compression."

"So we figure out a way to get Rinoa to do it. Shouldn't be too hard- all those bitches are real megalomaniacs."

"You're going to _willingly _trap yourself in Time Compression? Seifer, do you understand, this isn't just as simple as being jailed for the rest of your life- you'll be frozen inside that capsule, _forever_. If it's lost in Time Compression, you will never be freed. What if you're still awake, aware? We don't know exactly what it's like, being trapped in there. You might be frozen, but your brain could still be functioning on a basic level, taking in everything around you- we don't _know_. And you're willing to-"

"Yes."

"Why?"

"Because he's an idiot."

"Because it's worth it."

"…I hope Quistis understands how much you love her."

* * *

><p>The Sorceress Memorial will be ready in three days.<p>

For two days, he does not see her, and it isn't like he doesn't look, everywhere he can think of; she's probably just avoiding him, and it's not like he can really fucking blame her, after the way he's rejected her last couple of peace attempts.

Maybe her absence festers in his heart, but at least it gives him time to track down Ellone in between all the fucking he's sure she and Zell are doing and let her in on just enough of the plan to make sure she'll be there, safely outside wherever it is they track Rinoa down, awaiting Pubes' all-clear. Persuading her to keep her mouth fucking shut where Wuss is concerned is harder, but pointing out that he'll want to help if he knows what's going on- and that, of course, will put his precious little retard-hair ass in harm's way- gets her, which means they're both on the same page at least, and have a wonderful little fucking life to them both.

He really hopes they do.

He doesn't talk to Pubes at all; nothing they can do right now anyway, except sit on their hands until the Memorial is finished. No sense flushing her out of hiding before it's done, and he hardly wants to spend his last few days making not-so-pleasant small talk with that asshole.

On the morning of the third, he decides to stop hanging around the Palace all day, because it's pathetic as hell, and if he's about to spend the rest of eternity locked away inside a plastic coffin with all the voices in both their heads, he wants to at least see the goddamned sky one more time.

He sits on the front steps, watching the city being restored piece by piece by piece around him, bomb-cracked sidewalks being re-poured, molded anew, layered over with fresh shiny new coats of liquid-mercury cement, and he tips both elbows down onto his knees and lets his hands swing loosely between his knees, squinting off into the sunrise.

It's a good one, today.

Matron used to tell him that sunrises were beginnings, new chances, but he'd never been a morning person anyway, and the thing was, if you wanted to know the truth, he'd always preferred sunsets: that was where all the really good parts of the fairytales happened, the riding away to happy endings with princesses tucked safely into loving arms, monsters vanquished, witches slain, heroes alive and well and beloved by all, immortalized between yellowing pages and hand-etched covers, and he is fucking _done _pissing and moaning over the fact that he is never going to get one of those endings-

But it still hurts, if he is being honest with himself.

He looks up into the sky and blinks away little black-tinged stars of blindness, each as bright as the sun themselves, and in the streets below him shovels gong, machinery beeps, rumbles, shifts aside shattered sections of roadway with deep earthquake tremors that rock the ground underneath him, and dawn paints all of these moments into stark relief, little red-stained snapshots preserved for just this one moment in time, for him, full of all the things he is never going to see again: birds in the sky and smiling faces in the streets, wheezing asthmatics of ancient paint-peeling buses laboring slowly past, faces pressed into pig's snouts of curiosity up against windows stamped in cirriform smoke-

He wonders if boy Seifer would understand why it is he is doing what he's doing. All that fairytale shit stuffing the kid's head- yeah, he'd probably get it. And maybe his armor's a little dented, but he's sort of the hero in the end after all, right? Maybe he's not going to get the girl or that sunset or some overly grateful asshole's entire kingdom, but he is exchanging either his life or his freedom for one woman, for someone who is not him, for a reason other than misplaced ambition, for this one life-changing emotion that he is finally not too selfish to feel.

That's one hell of a fucking love story right there, if he's ever heard one. What kind of fairytale knight ever made a sacrifice like that? What kind of folk tale protagonist gave up everything he'd ever struggled inch by inch by inch to claim, just for some woman he will not even have in the end, who will mourn him, get over him, and eventually back herself onto the dick already waiting in the wings?

He wonders if she will keep his tags.

He wonders how much of an impact he will have created in the overall scope of her life, once all is said and done and sucked away into overcast fog, roiling and thundering and folding above his head for as long as the world continues to rotate around its axis, until time itself does not exist anymore.

He's heard enough of Rinoa's babblings to know that he will be aware, he will be awake, he will feel each second tick, each minute tock, months sliding into years canting into decades slipping into eons, and it is still worth it, for her.

Her freedom versus his: it's not even a fucking contest.

She'll understand. She'll understand, and she'll get out, and she will have the life he wants her to have- the one she _deserves_- even if it's with someone else, and that is worth a million fucking eons in Time Compression.

* * *

><p>She leans up against the driver side door of her small black rental car, taps the button on her keychain, and now her smile pierces him all the way through, straight to the heart the way Rinoa's used to. He ducks his head and looks away with a frown, and somewhere the man this smile is really intended for is off plotting his own demise, and not telling her burns in his throat and sticks in his chest, and he keeps his lips sealed carefully shut.<p>

"I'll be back in a few days."

He scuffs the ground with the toe of his boot, and what can he even _say_, to encompass even one millimeter of everything that is roiling and boiling and winging about inside him; how can he make up for one single moment of weakness that has driven a wedge between them and pried them apart, that has not even put a dent in Seifer Almasy's love for this woman, and does she really even _understand _that-

He is not sure if he even understands it.

Has he ever loved someone so unselfishly? Has there ever been someone who is so singularly important to him that he will trade a life with them for an eternity that leads nowhere, that is full of nothing, just to be absolutely one hundred percent certain they will peacefully live out the rest of their life, even if it is not with him?

He used to think he would do anything for Rinoa, go anywhere, be anyone, loop himself into complicated figure eights of knots just to bend over backward far enough to accomplish anything she could ever possibly want-

But he is just not _sure_: Almasy has always had balls he will never in a million years possess, and could he really lock himself away inside a prison that is not just a life sentence, but an incarceration that will last until the stars themselves burn out?

He wants to say yes, to take Seifer's place beside her, to embrace this chance that is the only one they will ever have again, to be _together_-

But he has a son, and the Rinoa Heartilly who is not some bland-smiling monster burning to cinders his home and his friends and his family, the Rinoa Heartilly who used to re-arrange his desk for 'maximum efficiency', ensuring he would spend the next few days frantically overturning his office looking for the files she'd misplaced -this Rinoa is carefully preserved in Adan Leonhart, and this Rinoa would want him to be the father he grew up not having, would want their tiny helpless son to know that both his parents love him, both of them are _with _him, even if he is never going to see one of them again.

The duty of every parent is to put their child first, no matter how badly it hurts, no matter how much they must sacrifice, and maybe his father did not find him in time to do that, to be there when he wanted to know what was so wrong and unlovable and horrible about him, but his son will never wonder that, will never try to understand why he is only another lonely abandoned kid clamoring for attention in any way he knows how to get it, and he is so _sorry_, Quistis-

"I'm sorry," he blurts out, re-arranging his too-tight collar, and he cannot look at her.

She wrinkles both eyebrows together, frowning. "For what, Squall?"

"For…for what happened. I didn't mean for it to…I just…uh…it just happened. I'm sorry," he says tightly, and this is as good as it's going to get, as much as he can manage, because all he can see is the look on her face, when he returns home to tell her the glances she keeps pitching behind him will find no one else, will snag on nothing that is important to her, because he left Seifer Almasy behind in a little lightless box full of all his worst nightmares, and abandoned him to forever.

Her face softens, and she glances down at the key ring in her hand, and he swallows, swallows again, and he wants to know if he will ever have enough willpower to swallow down everything he cannot and will not and desperately wants to tell her. "It's all right. I understand, Squall; you're lonely-"

"It's not that," he interrupts her roughly, and her eyes slide up to find his, and he can feel everything he can't tell her etched into his drumskin lips and his even more rigid cheeks, and she blinks once, twice, and he can tell that at last- _at last_- she gets it.

She jingles the keys in her hand, closes her fist tightly around them, looks away out into the sunrise, all scab-healing pinks and new-wound red, and there is nothing to say, and they both know this, they both _understand _this, and he thinks about how very, very stupid Almasy is, to not get what passes between them without words.

It is Seifer for her, always, forever, and there is no time left for Almasy to see this, and suddenly something stings in his eyes and closes itself over his throat, and it is a long moment before he can speak at all, standing beneath this scab-healing sunrise bleeding warmth into this city slowly picking itself up and dusting itself off and going on with its life the way Seifer Almasy never will after today, if his plan goes the way he hopes.

His secret is so hot and hard and tight inside his throat it is physically painful to speak around it, but they both have the same goals here: stop Rinoa; save Quistis. He can't jeopardize this, he cannot open his mouth and heave up from inside of him everything that is ugly and burning and too difficult to bear, because one short explanation from him will spin her back around into Seifer Almasy's arms until everything is done and over with and unable to take back, and if it's not Seifer then it is her, and he can't lose them both.

He is ok with never having her, with this distant love that will never be shared or returned or reciprocated in any way, but he can't- he can't let her _go_, when he is already letting go of a longer dream, a love that stretches even farther back, and it is not what Seifer would want either, and there is a very small part of him that wants to honor this more than he wants to be happy.

Seifer Almasy threw away his life in one bloodlust moment of blind ambition and even blinder familial love, and fought his way back into it with teeth and nails and something even stronger than that blind ambition and even blinder familiar love, and when Irvine died something inside of him withered, and it was the same something that withered inside Squall Leonhart's own fragile aching chest, and now he can search and prod and stir up old ashes in his heart, but he just can't hate him anymore.

He is just so _tired_, worn-out, ground-down, and he thinks that somewhere in the shift between antagonist and protagonist, Seifer Almasy may have blossomed into something better than he will ever be.

"Don't let him do anything stupid while I'm gone." She is smiling, and it's like she _knows_, and he chokes his heart back down and tries to squeeze out something reassuring, except she is already speaking again, and he can't do anything but listen, his stomach in a puddle between his feet. "I know the two of you have been at odds for a long time, have never gotten along, going all the way back to when we were all just kids at the orphanage…but you sent SeeDs you couldn't really spare to D-District, to save us when we needed it, and I don't think that was all for me and Irvine and Zell. You let him out of the holding cells when no one was sure whether he'd been affected by Rinoa, whether he was safe or not- and back in Odine's lab, over a year ago, you came back for us, for _both _of us- not just for me. I think, whether you realize it yourself or not, whether you want to admit it, you care about him too. As much as you tormented one another when you were younger, all throughout your years as cadets, there was always a little respect there, too. For both of you. You were brothers once upon a time, Squall. Seifer remembers that too, whether it seems like it or not."

He blinks once, hard, twice, even harder, and keeps staring down at the scarred tips of his boots.

"Just don't…don't let him…give him a chance to come home," she says quietly, and opens the car door.

He swallows once, again, _again_, and he watches her drive away with both hands in his pockets and his heart in his throat, and he should have told her, she has the _right _to know-

But not to throw away Seifer's sacrifice, which is exactly what she will do if she finds out the truth, and he turns away with something stinging in his eyes again and throttling closed his throat, and he walks slowly step by step by step back toward the Palace, staring up into the last sky Seifer Almasy will ever see.

* * *

><p>"I'd like to talk to you for a minute," Laguna says quietly, stepping out into the hallway and closing his door softly behind him.<p>

"Memorial done?"

"Yes. But that's not what I want to talk to you about. Not here, though; you mind stepping inside?"

There is no usual entourage hanging around inside, no Kiros leaning one hip against his friend's desk or surly-faced son in the corner or Ellone looking up from her work with a smile, just that wide mirror-shining desk and Squall Leonhart's father, his once-upon-a-time hero in shitty D-grade costume armor.

"Quistis is gone," Squall's father tells him gently, like he knows this will be a blow, like he understands how this folds him over and slowly unravels him to the knees, and this is the way it _should _be: no final good-bye to give away what he is planning to do, no breathless kisses or romance movie monologues or last inhalations of her soft vanilla hair and her even softer coconut skin, but it still feels like this fucker has taken a knife to his heart and carved away the biggest half of it, and now he can only stand here blinking, not saying anything. "She left a little while ago; went back to Garden for some medical procedures. She thought Kadowaki might be able to do something to temporarily help her, so she could be there for the end. I thought she probably didn't tell you."

He links his hands behind him, comes to at-ease, because this is the pose she always adopts when she is uncertain or upset or in need of bolstering, of bracing, and maybe there's something to it after all. "I haven't talked to her in a few days."

Laguna muffles a cough in the palm of his right hand and looks away with eyes that are too shiny, and he transfers his own gaze to the window behind the sprawling paper-strewn desk of Esthar's president, because he does not need this little fucking heart-to-heart with Pubes' father, of all people.

"You're a good kid, Almasy. Sometimes you hide it really well, but you are, and…I wish Quistis had seen that sooner, given you kids longer." He clears his throat. "I gotta' tell you, this plan is pretty flimsy, at best. But everything involving the sorceresses always has been, because there are just so many variables, because they are just so _powerful_…the best-laid plans have usually been the ones that have failed the worst, and I think you're actually on to something here, a way to stop this for good, to keep the succession from passing on, and I have…a selfish request from a father to make.

Don't let anything happen to my son, or Ellone. I understand…I understand that they're necessary to all of this, that even if I keep them here somehow, if I keep them out of all this, they could just as easily still be taken away from me…I get that the only way to really make sure they are safe is to stop her, permanently…but you've gotta' understand, Seifer, they're all I _have_. Ellone, Squall-" Laguna's throat catches, hangs up on itself, and his sweaty at-ease hands squeeze themselves together, so hard he can feel all the bones in his fingers press themselves painfully into one another. "I think Galbadia might finally be coming around, that there's going to be a resolution to this war soon, and if they can just make it past this...it might all be over, you know? I know you've made a lot of mistakes, but we all have -not one of us is exempt from screw-ups, you know? But I think you can do it- I really do, Seifer- and if there's any way you can do it without sacrificing yourself, if you can see any other way out of this…take it." His throat works itself slowly over that catch again, and now he meets Seifer's eyes with a slight smile on his lips and that glaze still in his eyes, and fucking kill him now, before he grows a vagina. "You just don't let go of something like what you and Quistis have."

He licks his lips, tongues his voice back up into his throat from wherever he has lost it. "I'm not letting go. I'm giving her a chance." And this chance- this chance is more important than anything he has ever dreamed or read or had beaten into his head, and don't get him wrong: it sucks balls it has to be brought about this way, but he understands now about those fairytales, and all the shit they were stuffed so very very goddamned full of. He was an impressionable kid and his mother was a nice lady who thought his little games and declarations and aspirations were just the cutest fucking things ever, and what he has just discovered recently, possibly even this very second, is that he does not hate her for it anymore.

Mostly, he just hopes she is proud of him.

Laguna nods slowly, squeezes his hands as tightly together as his own, clicks his eyes away, brings them back to Seifer's face, and now there is a soft smile on his lips, and if he's not careful, that vagina really will show up after all. "You and my son have been at each other's throats for your whole lives. You could probably…you could probably easily convince him that the best way to get her into the Memorial is to step inside himself. He suggested it himself, a few days ago. Why not do it?"

Because one of the secrets he has never let fully out of its box, not even to Quistis, is that he does not really hate Squall Leonhart after all.

He has never hated Squall Leonhart, down deep where it counts, down deep where there are all these sun-drenched memories of two boys, one light, one dark, pounding mutual understanding and hard-won respect into one another with tiny flailing fists.

"Because I'm a selfish dick, and if Squall make some kind of shitty grand romantic gesture like that, Quistis will never get over him." The smile Laguna gives him tells him this lie is plain as fucking day on his face, but he lets it sit there between them anyway, and maybe the guy is not such a bumbling clueless fucking retard after all.

"You're a lot better man than you want people to think, you know that?"

* * *

><p>She tries, sometimes, to pick out the hints she missed, the clues she stumbled over so very, very incompetently.<p>

She does this from time to time, because she still does not quite understand how she missed them, how she skimmed right over the top of everything that was good about him to notice only what he wanted her to see. Back when she was still all wrapped up in the idea of Squall Leonhart, the conviction that somewhere beyond that mask was a man worth getting to know, a man just as lonely as she, a man who would sense that thin connective thread of isolation between them, who would _fix _it- she had given him all the benefit of the doubt in the world, every little excuse she could find to explain his cold replies, his even more coldly unsmiling face-

And then he had told her to talk to a wall, when all she needed was someone to listen, someone who would _care_, for just a moment, about how Cid Kramer's decision had hollowed her out and sucked her dry, folding her into a little collapsed doll of a thing, and he had turned away, he had _rolled his eyes _and left her alone in a place no one goes to be alone.

He has told her many things over the years, but never that: he has only ever wanted her to see him, even if the only way she can view him is through the blind red haze of her rage.

He did what she never could: looked beyond the mask, peeled aside the façade, only he did it to _her_, to show her something beyond her comprehension, beyond her own limited understanding of just who Quistis Marae Trepe was supposed to be.

What he shoved into her face, crammed down her throat, made her flicker a second startled look toward, was the fact that she was not _supposed _to be anything: she is only supposed to be Quistis Marae Trepe, and that gets to mean whatever she wants it to.

And now she thinks about how this feels like a good-bye, a eulogy, and she wants to know why she is suddenly so frightened, why driving beyond city limits, leaving only exhaust smoke and dust in her wake, squeezes her throat down into a tiny dry-desert pinhole of a thing, why this squeezing in her throat and this terror in her stomach twitch her hand on the gear shift, slip her foot from pedal to brake-

The landscape outside her window is all blur and fog and early-morning sunrise bleeding itself dry between clouds that shift and roil and break apart. Inside the dry-desert pinhole of her throat, her heart ticks itself feebly through another beat, a vibration, and why can she not _shake _this feeling of _missing _something, of something overlooked-

She knows him and she knows that nothing she has ever done or felt or harbored for Squall Leonhart is enough to turn him completely away from her, to abandon her to this fate she and Rinoa may very well share, and he is just so _showy _about these sorts of things sometimes, damn his life and damn the world, if it is standing in his way, and she should have _pushed _harder, she should have searched all the way through his eyes until she could at last find reassurance for this ticking in her throat and this pressure in her stomach-

But she never did, and now all she can feel is this ticking in her throat and this pressure in her stomach and this rising crest of bile that tells her she cannot stop him: he will do something stupid and he may not survive it and the last thing they said to one another was _get the fuck out I don't want to talk to you right now_, and are those really going to be the last words between them-

She looks down at the phone on the empty passenger seat beside her and the sign that looms overhead: _Balamb 100 miles_, and she swallows down this ticking in her throat and ignores this pressure in her stomach, because she has _some _time, at least; she _must_: They have not even found Rinoa yet, do not have a viable plan for what they will do when they do find her, and she has to believe that this will hold out, that this situation will not implode until she can watch it burn to ashes before her, because whether he lives or dies she does not want him to do it without her. It is going to be her and him, to the very end: wasn't that the plan?

This landscape outside her window that is all blur and fog and early-morning sunrise begins to solidify, to piece itself together into something substantial, and she watches the speedometer needle wind down and down and down-

The ticking in her throat is gone.

She flexes her fingers very carefully on the steering wheel, relaxes her hand on the gear shift-

She drives on.

* * *

><p>She waits until Seifer leaves and Zell ducks out after him to lift his phone guiltily from the nightstand, heart drumming in her ears and nausea swelling in her throat.<p>

The room squeezes itself around her, a pinpoint of soft white lamp light like dust, rain, little flashing pieces of glitter at the corners of her eyes, and she feels her throat seal itself similarly, carefully packaging away the voice she gropes blindly down around inside of herself to find.

Three measured breaths do not quite bring it back, but they give her a starting point, a beginning, and she dials with one eye on the door and the other on the cream-colored wall in front of her, and please, _please _pick _up_-

The squeezing of the room around her transfers itself to her chest, her heart, and she is all brittle bone dust in soft white lamp light like rain, pressed flat inside, and she shouldn't be doing this; she _knows _she shouldn't be doing this, but it is not _fair _for Quistis to be kept in the dark, to not know, to drive blindly off into the sunrise with hope in her heart and that soft smile on her lips, and now there is a click, a white-noise buzz of connection, and she swallows past the squeezing in her throat and the dust in her chest.

"Quistis?" Her fingers shift themselves nervously on his phone, and she keeps that one eye trained steadily on the door, breathing carefully into the lamplight. "It's Ellone. I think…I think you should come back."

* * *

><p>The door has just barely clicked shut behind them when all the pent-up anger in his chest explodes out through his lips: "What the <em>fuck<em>, man?"

"Fucking dial it down, Wuss; your high-pitched woman screech almost blew my eardrums."

He will _not _shut his freaking mouth- what the _hell _does this asshole think he is _doing_-

"You want to use Ellone as _bait_? And freaking _kill yourself_ in the process?"

"Don't be such a dramatic little bitch."

"Why didn't _you tell me_?" he yells, and this is what it really comes down to- this is what folds him up inside and creases him along the corners for good measure, because how could he just _walk away _like this, after _everything_, after they have been through _so much_, after _Irvine_-

He has lost one best friend and Almasy was just going to let him lose another, just like that, without even _telling _him what did he _fucking _expect why would he _do _this to him does he even- does he even _understand_-

"Wuss-"

"_Stop fucking calling me that_. Irvine's dead and I have to live in this house alone with his gun leaning up against the wall like he's going to come back for it and now you want to do the _same thing to me- _how could you just leave me _hanging _like that- how could you not even give me a fucking _clue_-"

Seifer's mouth is firmly shut for once, and now he looks away down the hall, scratching underneath the point of his chin with a knuckle, and he wants so _freaking _bad to kick this asshole's face in, to put his boot to that thin white line of a mouth and keep going, keep _hammering _until Almasy's lower jaw is all bone dust and pulp; maybe he _should_; maybe it would teach him a _lesson_; maybe then he would get how fucking much this _hurts_-

"Ellone'll be fine. I promise," he says roughly, and he doesn't look back, doesn't take his knuckle away from his chin, and that's _fine_, don't have the _balls _to look him in the face- just _leave _you selfish fucking dickhole fucking _man_-

"What about you?" Zell snaps. "Laguna told me everything; he thought I _knew_. He thought you would have _told _me. He thought I would have been _included_."

"I don't _want you there_," Seifer snaps back, peeling his eyes away from the hall long enough to skewer him, to push his hot hooded gaze all the way through his skull where it sticks like a knife. "You little fucking shit- _I don't want you there_. Ellone's just the lure; she'll be kept out of the way. We just need her to get Rinoa to the Memorial, and then her part's done. Squall and I will do the rest."

"Just the two of you? You're going to take her on all by yourself-"

"She won't hurt him- she's always held back when it comes to him. There's enough left of Rinoa to recognize him and know she doesn't want to hurt him. Maybe she's still hoping he'll come over to her side."

"What about _you_, asshole?"

"Someone's gotta' keep her inside the Memorial. If she gets out at the last minute, if she gets the chance to heal herself, it's all fucking over. We get _one _goddamned shot at this. Ellone reels her in. Squall keeps her distracted: he shows her his little tree twig dick or he tells her she's gotten really fat or what the fuck ever, and then I stab the bitch, and I shove her in. He seals the Memorial. And that's it."

That's it- that's _it_- he will be locked away _forever _inside that thing and all he can say is _that's it_ what an _asshole _what a stupid stupid _asshole_-

"'That's it'?! What about Quisty, you jerk? What is she supposed to do- you never even _made up _with her. You're just going to leave like this- _you're just going to_-" He can't _see _this guy _pisses him off _so much and he doesn't know where the _hell _he was even going with that last statement because what the _hell _what the freaking _hell _who is supposed to _tell her_- how does he _expect them to tell her_-

The door slides quietly open behind his back, but he barely even notices this, because what's most important right now is making this asshole _eat fist_-

"Zell," Ellone says softly behind him, and he shoves his folded-up hands into his pockets and now his shoulders hunch up toward his ears, and he's not in the _mood_, all right; don't try to make this _ok_; don't tell him it will all be _fine_-

"I think you both should come back into the room to talk about this." She holds the door open wide enough to accommodate them both.

"Did you know what he was going to do?" he snaps, not looking at her, and please _please _tell him no, please tell him not everyone he loves was just going to leave him behind, let him lay down alone and wake up the next morning with no one-

"Some of it. Not all of it. I didn't know…I didn't know he planned to be locked away in there with her."

Seifer is looking away from him again, because he is a _coward_, because Quisty stole his balls and she never gave them back, and fuck this guy anyway, he doesn't _care_; go off and _die_, for all he gives a shit-

He stalks past her into the room and she reaches out to lay her soft little hand along his arm but _fuck that _too; she could have _told him_; she _should have told him_-

"How are you going to get her to open Time Compression?" Ellone asks, pulling her fingers back from his arm, and the look on her face is so wounded he wants to press her up against his chest, tell her he didn't mean it, he's a _jerk_, just ignore him, but he is still too _full_; he is going to implode, if he has to just _stand here _for one more second-

"We'll figure something out. Isn't that their thing? I thought all of them had a hard-on for that sort of shit. Shouldn't be too hard."

"She wants to trust Squall, but she doesn't trust him enough to just do anything he says. She's lonely, Seifer, and scared, but she's not Rinoa anymore, and you can't reason with her." She takes a breath, flicks a fleeting little look his direction and then hugs her arms across her stomach, cupping both elbows. "I think…I think I can do it."

"_No_."

"Zell-"

"_No_."

He is not even _hearing _this. She is going to stay right here and so will Seifer and they will find _another way_; they will figure something else out; he will not lose anyone else, _ok_?

_Please._

Just…_please_.

"Rinoa and I…Odine…did a lot of experimenting around Adel's time, before I was born. He was…_why _I was born," she says, and now she explains everything, and Seifer's gaze does not waver and his expression does not change and he sees her relief sag her shoulders and put something back in her eyes, and now it's his turn to look away, because he doesn't want to _see _anymore.

"Everything comes down to time, and the sorceresses aren't the only ones who can manipulate it; that's what I'm doing, when I send you back into the past. You're just seeing it, you can't change anything, but I think…I think what I can do is send you all into Time Compression through the past, when Ultimecia opened it."

"But we can't change the past- we're just looking at it. So how is that going to help at all?"

"Because Time Compression is complicated. If you go back into it in the past, you won't just be inside a memory of Time Compression- you'll be inside Time Compression again. When I sent Squall and the others those dreams of Laguna, they weren't just dreaming about his memories- they were _inside _his memories. In Time Compression, there are a thousand different possibilities, different futures, different pasts, different presents; you can change things from the inside."

"What about the Memorial?"

"I think I can send it too; I send someone's consciousness into the past or the future, but Rinoa's will be frozen inside the Memorial. She'll be…fused, I guess is the right word; the force field, whatever you want to call it, that seals magic and prevents whoever is inside from escaping or using magic, is taken from the energy force that makes up Guardian Forces. That's what Odine used to make it powerful enough to hold a sorceress. All the stuff Rinoa was reading, how she found out about me…I didn't understand all of it. But the way its sealed…he took a piece of Adel, and he…he bound it to the Memorial, somehow, I think, if I understand right. The Memorial is kind of…it's kind of part sorceress itself, I guess you could say. Not that it's _alive_, or anything, but I think there's enough of that energy there for me to send it through time, the way I did with Ultimecia."

Seifer frowns and rubs one temple with his fingers. "My head fucking hurts."

She smiles gently and folds her hands together in front of her, and he still can't quite look at her, not when this is all so _raw_, not when he still misses Irvine _so much _and Seifer is just _standing _here discussing all of this like he's trying to decide what he wants for dinner, like this stupid, _stupid _decision is not going to devastate Quisty, or _him_-

He doesn't want to lose the asshole, ok- _ok_? He just wants everything to turn out _fine_; he wants them all to _go home_; they have lost so _damn much_-

"Zell?" Ellone twists her head around toward him, and now the smile on her face flattens itself out, smoothes itself back into her soft white skin and she just _stares_, like he is supposed to know how to answer her, like he is just supposed to nod his head and agree and let them all go off without him to get _killed_-

"I can help," she tells him, and her eyes are just so freaking _big_; he can't look at them and he can't look _away _from them, and tell him what to do- tell him how to _choose_-

What can he do to make this all _right_; is there any answer he can offer, any other _option_?

Don't leave him. Don't either of them leave him, _please_, don't expect him to just take this lying down, not after Irvine, not now that he finally has her back-

"Wu- Zell."

Something about this sucks all the fight out of him and sags him down on the bed and now he can only sit here looking at his hands, turning them over and over and over, like this elusive answer, this other option, is printed here across his knuckles, and if he can only tilt his hand just right, tip his head just so, he will _have _it, and no one will have to die, and Ellone will come home to him and one day they will get to be old together, one day they will own a house with a garage and a barbeque and a little garden out back and he will not lose anyone else until it's their time to go.

"There's no other choice," Seifer says, and Zell has never heard his voice sound this…_deflated_. This same something that has sucked the fight out of him has drained it from his friend as well, and now there is just _silence_, so heavy he can feel it pressing down on his shoulders and filling up all the space between them. "If you have another idea, I'm listening."

It _hurts_, man it hurts so _bad_, to hear that faint little lift in the guy's voice, that little choking kernel of hope he can't quite swallow down, and he just…he can't sit here and be angry anymore, not when that faint little lift tells him how bad Seifer wishes there was another way, how much he wants to come home.

He squints his eyes hard.

"I have to be there," he whispers. "Ok? I _have _to be there, man."

Seifer clears his throat. "Yeah. Whatever, Wuss. I guess you're gonna' fucking stalk me to the very end, huh?"

* * *

><p>Most people do not know when the end will come: life is a sort of freefall, and you know the ground is somewhere down there far below, that it is going to splatter you like shit all over that proverbial fan one day, but the question is <em>when<em>, or maybe _how _or _why_, and the really relaxing thing about being him right now, in this second of missed heartbeats and rustling clothing in the dark, is that he already has all of these questions figured out.

He has already been handed these answers, no more _whens _or _hows _or _whys _for him, and if you ask him, it's preferable this way.

Straight answers, hard facts: he is a soldier, and this is his life, and today it is over, and that is just the way it fucking goes.

Today is the last day of his life, and he has not kissed the woman he loves or even managed one final glimpse of her, not a single goddamned _moment _of this one woman for whom he is throwing away his whole fucking future-

But he's not going to sit here and get all fucking butthurt about it, when this is the way it is supposed to be, the way it _has _to be: he's got one fucking hell of an end number to worry about anyway, and what he'd rather do right now is picture everything that came before this moment that is all cramped legs and numb ass cheeks and little flashes of Dincht's blonde head behind jumbles of metal containers.

He doesn't have long. Pubes says there is no way to know whether she will show up today, whether she will show up at all, but he's been around this block before, see, and he knows: he _feels_ it, even if Pubes does not, and she is coming, and there is nothing they can do to stop him.

He looks one final time at that little sunny flash of Dincht's head poking out around steel drums full of who-the-fuck-knows-what- this is Odine's old place, after all- and he can _feel _the smile on his face, all soft edges and warm and fucking fuzzies in his chest, and fucking figure that one out: He is going to miss Zell Dincht and his incessantly flapping yap just as much as he misses his mother and the cowboy, Fujin and Raijin; almost as much as he will miss Quistis.

He tips his head back against the shelf above his head, crouches lower, coils himself tighter, and he shuts his eyes, and now he just lets himself coast, drift, float down through layers of memory, and he thinks about how dying is a little like dreaming. Not white-hot and edged, but softer: popsicle smiles on summer beaches and soft voices beneath sex-scented bedcovers and her hand finding his in the dark, and now his own hand slides a little on Hyperion, shifts one final time on the grip, and this too he is going to miss.

No more cold steel in his hand or hot blood in his veins and what is an eternity of soft gray storm over his head going to be like? How much of it will he understand? Will she find him one day, after she has lived her life all the way through to the end and come out the other side, gray and bent and happy?

Below him, Ellone lets out a soft noise, a little indrawn hiccup.

His eyes flash open.

There are little spirals of white in front of him, fleeting flickers of momentary blindness, and he squeezes down with his lids and three seconds, two, one, and they peel themselves back once more, and somewhere beyond him is a _pulling_, a testing-

Ellone's soft noise becomes an asthmatic's wheeze, and Zell breaks cover.

He crouches lower.

Squall makes a grab for Zell as he runs, comes up with his elbow, is shaken free like he is just barely an afterthought.

It takes everything inside of him to stay crouched in this hot dusty shelf still dotted here and there with little see-through containers that creep the fuck out of him, to simply exist as Ellone waves Zell back, shakes her head, as the pulling becomes stronger, closer, and suddenly he is sweating, shivering, sick all the way down to the tips of his toes-

Ellone stands.

Zell is prodded back into his hiding place by Squall, and now his voice strangles itself into a small rattling protest in the back of his throat, and Seifer crouches lower.

From the hallway there is the soft tap tap tapping of footsteps.

He slants Hyperion down across his knees, and seconds have never lasted this long before: he is one final inhalation packed solid in his lungs, and as this pulling, this testing, inches closer and closer and closer, he is all statue, ice, and he thinks one final time of Quistis Trepe's blue eyes behind perfectly-positioned glasses, and then his fear blasts away everything else, and he can only pray this end number does not open with him blowing chunks.

"Ellone?"

Zell stands again, is again wrestled back into shadows by Squall. Pubes is as white as the fucking hand he watches Ellone twist into a claw against the collar of her shirt.

"Ellone? Are you here?"

"Yes."

Rinoa stops in the doorway leading back into the hall, and for just a moment he is struck by how fucking frail she looks, how _young_: like this bitch piggybacking her has sucked away everything vital, all the gloss from her hair and the glow in her cheeks, and now there is only this flimsy husk of a women left behind, more shadow than girl.

He tongues the bile in his mouth back down into his throat, holds Hyperion tighter, closer, and forgive him, Instructor, for he has done something colossally fucking stupid- isn't that how the saying goes?

Close enough. True enough.

"Are you going to stay this time? Or are you going to leave me again?"

The claw against the collar of Ellone's shirt slowly relaxes inch by incremental inch. "I'm going to stay this time, Rinoa, don't worry. I'm sorry: you were right."

"I told you," she says, and there is so much sadness in her voice it takes him like a hammer between the ribs, and he can't feel _sorry _for this cunt: this is not Rinoa, and he is not killing a woman he used to bone, to care about-

"I'm sorry you had to find out like that, Ellone. It hurts, doesn't it? But it's ok- it was always supposed to be you and me. So we don't have to be alone, ok? We don't have to be alone ever again, if you don't want to."

He watches Squall nudge Zell farther back, keep him in check with a glare and a tight little jerk of his head, and then he too is on his feet, swaying just slightly, and her face shifts, transforms-

"Rinoa."

"Squall?" The transformation has morphed, collapsed in upon itself, and now she seems to sink, to press back into herself, and his crouch slowly unfurls, edges up, up-

"I brought her here."

"You did? Why? Don't you…don't you hate me, Squall? After everything I did? You know I'm sorry about that, but I had no other _choice_- I wish I didn't have to do this, but it's…it's me against you now, Squall, because you're with _them_. You left me all alone and there was nothing else I _could _do, and that's _your _fault. You took Ellone from me earlier, too, didn't you? I knew she didn't really want to leave- why would she want to leave me? She was _made _for me- we're supposed to be together, so that I'd never have to be _alone_-"

There is a catch in his voice when he can finally speak. "I know, Rinoa. I'm sorry. I didn't…I didn't understand how alone you were."

"You should have known," she whispers, taking a cautious step forward.

Squall's hand settles itself gently on Ellone's arm, tugs her even more gently backward.

"You still don't trust me. You know I _had _to do that, Squall- I didn't meant to hurt anyone; I don't _want _to hurt anyone- I really don't."

"I know, Rinoa," he says softly. "But-"

"But _what_? Why are you taking her away from me again? Why did you bring her back here, if you were just going to try to get her to walk away from me again?"

He makes each inhalation barely half a breath, a whisper, watching, watching-

"Rinoa, please; he's just being protective, ok? He's just not sure yet- he'll see that it's ok."

Pubes edges his boot heel back another inch, half an inch, one more inch, and just a little bit _closer_-

"Ellone, are you going to let him just take you _away _from me? You don't believe him, do you? I really didn't want to hurt all those people, Ellone, I promise- you can't go with him. They'll never understand us. They'll always just want to hurt us, you know? If you go with him, that's what it's going to be like for you, all the time."

"I'm not trying to take her away from you, Rinoa. I just need to make sure she's safe before I let her go. I'm sorry…I'm sorry I didn't understand before. I'm trying to now. I am, Rinoa."

One more breath: a tightening in his chest, down all the muscles in his right arm, convulsing his fingers shut around Hyperion-

One more step: Squall's hand leaves Ellone's arm and now he positions himself subtly off to one side, watching, head cocked just fractionally to the right, and one more _step_, bitch, _do it_-

And there it is, and now all the muscles in his legs finish unwinding themselves, and never say Seifer Almasy didn't go out with a fucking bang.

* * *

><p>There is a squeezing inside his chest, a single focal point of pain that is the only thing he can concentrate on right now.<p>

She is not gone after all. She has been compressed, shrunk down into a tiny folded layer of a thing inside this other Rinoa, this willow-branch woman who is now only atrophied muscles over frail candy sticks of bones jutting out like wings, but she is still _there_, because no centuries-old entity with enough power in its fingertips to ignite the entire world would walk so easily into this, be so naively drawn into what is so obviously a trap, and he understands at last that he has always known this, just a little.

Somewhere down deep inside of himself he understood about the layers, the other Rinoa, and he decided to kill her anyway.

What does this make him?

He hurts so badly, looking at her right now: he is all flame, and all he can do is be consumed inch by inch by inch, until everything that aches has been burned down to cinders, to little feathery wisps that used to be bones and organs and whatever is left of his soul, but there is no hesitation in his step as he drags it back, back, farther, just a little more-

There is not enough of her left to save; this _is _how he will save her, the only thing he can do for her now, and he wishes he could warn her, this tiny little heartbeat of old Rinoa flickering on and off like a dying flame somewhere deep inside this monster, but this is it; this is all that's left, and he just hopes she will understand.

He tugs Ellone back another inch, slides his hand from elbow to wrist, swallows, swallows again- his chest and his throat will never again work quite right, he knows- fumbles behind him for another inch, half an inch-

Above him in the shadows waits Seifer Almasy, poised to kill, and standing precisely where he needs to drop, to come down on top of this thing that used to be Rinoa, Squall Leonhart suddenly does not want to move, can_not _move, and for just a moment the world spins on around him. In front of him Rinoa Heartilly's breath hisses out in little shuddering gasps that sound raw, jagged, and above him Seifer Almasy's breath sighs in one final time, is caught and held, bated, and if he can only stand here until her breath sucks back in, until his flutters back out, Squall will be spit on the edge of that blade he can almost physically feel, hanging above him like an executioner's axe.

The world will stop spinning on around him and he will be cushioned, cradled, caught up in arms that coax and do not destroy, and she will be _herself_ again, for just a moment, for the eyeblink it takes to click time forward another notch, tick it on across the clock, to drain away his life into all the spaces in between those seconds clicking forward and ticking on_. _

And then he unfreezes and the seconds all crash together once more, piling one on top of another on top of another, and he knows he can't wait any longer.

Shifting Ellone off to one side with him is just inconspicuous enough to keep Rinoa on the same trajectory, straight ahead, and now above him is motion, an unfolding of shadow and muscle and perfectly-timed leap, and from the corner of one eye he watches Hyperion fall like a star and her arm streak up just as quickly-

* * *

><p>He is airborne.<p>

At first, he thinks this is merely the very bottom arc of the drop: the lowest point of this leap that is more controlled fall than anything-

And then something shatters, and his world upends, and it is like the sky itself comes apart: little pulsing explosions of white that break and break again and something burning along his side and screaming, scaling higher and higher and higher, and fuck _him_, he is pretty sure that's his voice-

His stomach turns over and he vomits, and for just this one second of upheaval, this rolling inside of him that keeps coming, like the goddamned ocean at high tide, he can suddenly see again, in little white-etched snapshots of moments: Wuss, scrambling out from his cover toward him; Squall, shoving Ellone back behind him hard enough to overturn several storage containers; Rinoa, pale and hunched and holding onto her stomach, like she is the one in fucking pain-

She has forgotten everyone else in the room: he remembers this single-minded purpose, recognizes this flashing in her eyes, and he thinks about what it's going to finally feel like, to actually be killed by one of these bitches.

Going to last a long time, he's pretty sure.

His vision doubles, clears, re-doubles, and just a few inches beyond his hand is Hyperion, sprayed red, and this same red is painted so liberally down his fingers it is as though he has dipped all his fingers into it, slipped it on like a glove, and it takes him a moment too long to understand what this red is, and who it belongs to.

And then Zell Dincht plows into her from the side, shoulder lowered, so hard she is lifted, airborne for three long seconds of weightless eternity that remind him of his own fall.

And he can suddenly move again.

Her focus has been shifted, re-directed, and he comes clumsily to both feet now, leaving behind more streaks of red, and standing is the most difficult fucking thing he has attempted in a long time now, but he's fucking _got _this, Pubes: keep your goddamned hands off him.

Something grinds inside of him, catches and clicks and sticks up against something else: broken rib. Broken everything, probably, and he does not even understand how it happened.

But this does not matter, because he has no choice now; he is seeing this through to the fucking end, and it's not like he needs to be all in one piece to do it.

Pubes' hasty Cure patches him sloppily back together again, a little ripped rag doll sewed wrong along the seams, and when he coughs, something bubbles up off his tongue and smacks itself wetly down across his lips, and now breathing is all salt-copper fluid, gluing his throat shut.

Didn't fix that broken rib, for sure, and that salt-copper adhesive in the back of his throat would be the taste of a punctured lung. He's tasted this before; with proper medical attention right after it happens, it's not as bad as it sounds. Here, now, it doesn't matter, because what does he need with fully functioning lungs in Time Compression?

Nothing to breathe but stale vent-cycled air and the little cirriform clouds of her batshit murmurings, chasing him down his own spiral into five shades of shithouse rat crazy.

Wuss is thrown, lifted bodily, and he charges without stopping to see if the fucker's ok.

No time. No fucking worrying or wondering or _thinking_: this is all action, reaction, instinct, and no one has ever excelled more at this than Seifer Almasy.

He is stopped by another shattering, an explosion that hammers him off his feet and into wet red heat, _spinning_, and for too long he hangs there, trying to breathe, to scrape his boots back up underneath him, and she is all over him once more, which at least means she's not off killing Wuss or Ellone or Pubes.

He has taken this shit before, and from his own mother, so go ahead and throw whatever you've got, _whore_, and see if he doesn't come up asking for more.

More white-etched snapshots collect along the edges of his vision: Ellone, knuckles chewed into little red smile lines where they ball up along her sides, eyes shut; Zell, dusting himself off for another round; Squall, halfway through a Thundaga spell that will distract her but barely even dent the fucking bitch-

He spits, uses his hand to lever himself back onto his feet, watches her eyes smoke, cloud over, sees Ellone twitch, twitch again out of the corner of his eye, and he lunges.

Protect slams itself up around her so quickly he is hurled backward, skidding, and if he could just stay on his goddamned _feet_-

Squall darts past, hits a full sprint, and one hand around the asshole's ankle and a sharp yank drops him like a fucking rock, because this is _his _fucking fight.

This is not about letting Pubes go home to his son or one last heroic stand that will mark him down in the history books as the hero boy Seifer always wanted to be: _fuck _all of that now.

He is pissed. He is fucking _livid_, and you can be cockknocking sure this is the last time one of these cunts pushes him around.

He times his next lunge more carefully, watching Ellone, keeping one eye on her and the other on the point of Hyperion that wavers far out in front of him, extended in _en garde_, and when there is another twitch, a tiny pulse, a corresponding flicker in Rinoa's shield, he leaps.

Sliding Hyperion home is like forcing it down through layers of stone, his muscles shivering, straining, bulging up through sinew and vein like cords of rope, but he's _in_, he is through, and even if he only nicks the tip of her shoulder, he understands how to play this game now.

"_Ellone, you fucking idiot; get over there_!" he screams as Squall looms up out of the swirling dust and shadows that form this patchwork sky over his head, and another thing he can at least say for Pubes is that he is not slow on the uptake; before his shout can even penetrate the haze of disorientation he watches web itself like a cataract across Rinoa's one open eye, he is left behind, alone, staring up into that one cataract-webbed eye with his heart in his throat.

He might be fucking pissed, but he is not stupid, and this is really going to hurt.

She is all acid and ice where she touches him, so cold he burns, goes up in flames, and he arches high, higher, thrusts himself up off the floor like this bowing of his body will eventually snap him in half, ending everything, and whoever can't accept that anger is the strongest emotion is a moron: there is still enough left in him to arc his hand up toward the collar of her shirt, and a tug on the material he bunches up in his fingers puts her nose to nose with him, close enough that he does not even have to strain to reach her throat with the heel hand he fires into it with as much force as he can generate from this angle.

Her Protect is still thick enough that something snaps in his hand when he does this, but he stuns her, whips her back, peels her hands free of his shuddering skin, and it wasn't his dominant hand anyway, and just like fully functioning lungs, it's not like he _needs _a working hand in Time Compression.

The worse shape he's in when Pubes seals him away in that box, the better, probably. Fuck himself up enough, and he probably won't be aware of much at all.

If time keeps folding itself away and layering itself deeper and peeling aside eon after eon over your head, who the fucks wants to be lucid enough to watch it anyway?

* * *

><p>"Ellone," she whispers, and there is so much raw pain in her voice that Zell falters, stumbles just slightly out of the stance he has taken up in front of Ellone, hip back, hands extended, weight equally balanced between both feet, bouncing lightly on the balls and nothing else. This is their <em>friend<em>, and he doesn't want to lose another one, not after he has already lost too many people, not with Seifer Almasy hunched over on his knees coughing up what appears to be an entire lung. He _can't do it_. Maybe they are wrong and it does not have to be this way- has anyone even _thought of that_; just _stop for a moment_- and this belief is so sharp and hard and hot it goes right through him, cuts something deep inside, smolders his heart into a little black-flaking pile of ash-

And watching her eyes as they swivel around toward the little shield he and Squall have made of themselves in front of Ellone, this hope dries up in his throat and freezes in his chest, and he _knows _there is no going back, that there is nothing else to do, but _Hyne _he wishes so _badly _it were different-

"Ellone, why are you helping them? Is that what you're doing? Why would you do that? Don't you understand how they're going to _treat _you, when they know? When they really, really understand? Look at what they've done to me- look at what they've done to _all _of us-"

"Stop bitching, cunt," Seifer snarls behind her, and now suddenly a thin line of silver blooms along the front of her shirt, just below and to one side of her navel, and something inside of him is loosened, set free, and he thinks _holy shit he _did _it_, and then a simple step, a pull, and she twists the handle of Hyperion free of Seifer's hand and pivots slowly around to face him.

He breaks rank, _lunges_, because Almasy is going to _die_- he can see this, he is _sure_, and he will never reach her in time-

* * *

><p>She watches Rinoa slide Hyperion out of her body as Zell unpeels himself from her side, but she can't take in any of this, not really.<p>

It is too important for her to concentrate, to grope back along that quivering line of connection between them, and _yank _on it, shake everything up until she feels Rinoa freeze uncertainly once more, swinging her attention around and away from Seifer Almasy.

She hopes she can give him enough time to do what needs to be done, and to get free.

It is like he is possessed, leaping here, swinging there, charging and falling and getting up all over again, swaying, bleeding, held together only by his own iron-rod will, and she can't let go, can't shake herself free and slink carefully away into the shadows, no matter how frightened she is.

She is his _chance_: she is perhaps his only chance, judging by the way he looks right now, the awkward angle of his hand and the heaving of his sides, stretching out and out and out for air they can't quite grab, and _please _let this work, _please please please_-

_-rinoa-_

_-ellone ellone what are you _doing_-_

_-rinoa stop please trust me-_

_-but you're helping them-_

It squeezes something inside of her down to a tiny aching knot at the back of her throat, to lie right now. She sounds so childishly _Rinoa_, tiny and hurt and confused, but this is only a simulacrum of Rinoa, a mask carefully crafted to look just like her.

_-I'm not rinoa just wait you have to trust me you said it was you and me right you said we would be together that it was going to be us against all of them well you have to _trust _me for that to happen-_

Rinoa's hand falters, slips, seizures open around Hyperion's handle, and now Ellone watches whatever it was she was planning for Seifer snap off like a light going out in her brain, and by the time Zell reaches them, Seifer doesn't even need him anymore.

He catches the gun blade, whips it back as Curaga knits together the edges of the last wound he left behind-

Protect is still too solidly in place; they are still too far away from the capsule.

Seifer's thrust bounces away, tears his weapon free from his hand, and he is almost too tired to pursue its skittering path across the floor.

She shuts her eyes.

_-rinoa come here please help me I need you to get squall away from me ok-_

She watches Seifer stumble, buckle, get helped back to his feet by Zell, who is so pale she just wants to hold him, to be held by him-

But put that away, for right now. Box the emotion off, stick it down somewhere deep inside her to be carefully opened again one day, when this moment is done and over with and they have all survived it, when they have all come through alive and together and if not happy, at least grateful for everything they have painstakingly earned.

_-rinoa _please _come here just don't hurt him ok don't hurt him he doesn't want to do this to us I know he doesn't I think he's being tricked ok-_

There is a cautious step forward, a relaxing of those white cheeks, and Rinoa is consumed by sudden hope: Ellone can see it in her eyes, in the way she uncurls her hands and lets the smallest of smiles stretch itself over her lips, and all she can see now is a lonely frightened woman who wants to be loved, who is terrified to be abandoned-

She falters, loses her grip on this quivering line of connection between them, but it doesn't matter anymore.

He turns Rinoa with one hand on her shoulder, angling her back toward the capsule that will seal them both away forever, and Hyperion carves up, up, slices through the last flickering layers of Protect like they are only flimsy halves of torn tissue paper, and then something in her own chest flares, detonates, drops her to her knees, and now there is a sudden release of pressure, a letting go, and she sags into Squall's arms the way Rinoa crumples into Seifer's.

* * *

><p><em>I have seen this death coming a million times before. Different face, of course, but it all feels the same, when you're in the moment: ozone-reek in your nostrils and this squeezing pressure in your gut, like the part of you that is still just a child afraid of all the monsters in the closet is about to piss his goddamned pants, but you don't: you stand and you take it like a fucking man, because that is what you fucking <em>are_, even if she never quite wanted you to believe it._

_ I am not a child anymore. It took me a long time to figure out that boy Seifer was not dead after all, just buried a long ways down, but he is not all of me. He is not even most of me. _

_ She wanted to keep him close to the surface because boy Seifer was the one who couldn't let go of his mother, who couldn't accept that she wasn't his mother anymore, just one of those closet monsters wearing her skin, and I used to think _fuck that little shit; let the goddamned bastard die, _but he is really the one who kept me sane through all of this, who stored away my humanity until I was ready to face it again._

_He is the one who loved that bossy blue-eyed bitch all along, and I can't begrudge the little shit that, can I? _

_This is not my mother, but I am doing this for her, for Quistis, for Rinoa, for everyone whose life has ever been irrevocably fucked over by one of these batshit bitches, and maybe I couldn't save Matron, or the cowboy or Raijin and Fujin or any number of other goddamned people I have actually let myself care about, and maybe I can't save myself, but I like to think this flick of my wrist is not just a perfectly-executed lunge that grinds all the bones in my injured hand together, slanting Hyperion up through her ribs and into her heart-_

_ What I'm really doing is setting Rinoa free. _

_ I like to think that Hyperion doesn't so much carve into her as let her loose, slice her bonds, and the part of her that is Rinoa, the spiritual part, if you believe in that fucking shit, just flies away, that it's just going to be me and this thing inside her locked away forever, because say what you will about the bitch's shitty taste in men or goddamned annoying fucking sunshine attitude, she doesn't deserve this._

_ Maybe I don't either. _

_ You be the judge._

_ If you believe in karmic justice or just desserts or what goes around comes around or all of that shit, then I do deserve this: I've killed more people than you will ever even meet in your entire goddamned life, and somewhere up above, if there is a god or divine justice or whatever the fuck people who have time for faith believe in, he/she/it is probably creaming themselves right now. _

_ Maybe you think I didn't mean to, or I was manipulated, or I've made up for it in a thousand different ways; and maybe I didn't, and I was, and I have, but those black marks are still on my record, just like all those little neatly-penned notations good old Instructor no. 14 used to spend hours scribbling all over my files._

_ The thing is you can never take back what you have done, no matter how it came about; you can only ever try to make up for shit. You can only ever try to forgive yourself, let it go, walk beyond it, and do better next time. Make another choice; take the different option. _

_ Fall in love._

_ Maybe none of the paths I stumbled down lead me to immortality or marble statues in village squares or world domination or any of that shit, but they lead me to her, and you know, in the end, that's just fucking fine with me. _

_ Call me a pussy if you want, but maybe some of that shit about love conquering obstacles isn't so shitty after all. _

_ Look at what it did for an asshole like me._

_ I shove as hard as I can. _

_ She hits me with something that whites out my whole world, in the flash of moment between Hyperion entering her chest and pushing all the way in to reach her heart, but whatever it is is not enough to take me off my feet this time, and I press my forearm into her neck as hard as I can as blood sprays between us, mine or hers, I'm not sure, and together we hit the back wall of the capsule, and I have just enough breath for one last bellow, an order that brings a stunned Pubes scrambling back to his feet._

_ I said before that dying is like dreaming; what I probably should have said is that preparing to die is a little like dreaming, all drift and coast and floating away through memories and all that shit._

_ I don't have time to drift or coast or float before my world goes black. _

_ It is cold, and it hurts; it hurts a fucking lot, if you want to know how it really is, and I don't have enough left in me to page back through any of my moments with her: I am suctioned away into a void, into all this fucking white noise that drowns the sound of her laugh and the soft murmuring of her voice and even her yelling, but what I do have time for is one last shard of understanding, sharp enough to pierce the fog around me, and what I understand is that I have won, and she is safe. _

_ And then I am nothing, and one day you will be too, but forget that: just for right now, figure out how you're going to live. _


	32. Epilogue

**Epilogue**

Odine's Lab

Esthar

She hits the front door at a full sprint, skids her way into the first corridor just as quickly, but there is nothing to find here anymore.

She is too late.

She knows this by the absence of nausea in her stomach and the way her heart flattens itself out into a tiny little two-dimensional shadow of a thing inside her chest, and now running is not so much a smoothly efficient afterthought of motion as a stumble, a controlled fall.

When she reaches the end of the corridor at last, Ellone is the only one left.

She is kneeling in the middle of the floor, blood all around her, Squall's SeeD jacket draped over her shoulders, and when she looks up at Quistis something inside of her bends, breaks, and she is suddenly kneeling as well: not because of any previous plan to do so, not because she wants to, but simply because she _knows_, and knowing is something that cannot be undone, that can never be taken back.

She sees her life without him in little half-second snapshots that flicker on and off so quickly she almost misses them, but it doesn't matter, because what she is seeing is all the same thing: muted lights and darker darks and no blonde head creeping its way onto her pillow in the morning, Zell carving his way through the training center without that same blond head beside him, and there is no _room _for this, not when Irvine's death is still so fresh; how does he expect her to _bear _this, when he was supposed to be there for her, when he was supposed to help her _through_-

"Send me in," she whispers.

"Quistis, I'm so, so sorry, Quistis. It's too late. Squall…by now Squall's made sure it's somewhere no one can reach. And he was…he was really badly hurt. I don't know…I don't know if he would have made it, even if he hadn't trapped himself in the Memorial with her."

"Please, Ellone. _Please_. Just send me in. I don't care- I just…I just have to…"

What she needs to do is say good-bye, even if he cannot hear her anymore.

"_Please_."

"What if it hurts you, Quistis? Time Compression is like this different reality, like some different dimension, and maybe that itself wouldn't hurt you, but getting you there…"

"Please try. I don't care if it hurts me. Ellone, just…_please_."

"What if it kills you, Quisty?" she says hoarsely, shrugging Squall's jacket up higher on her shoulders. "Then there'd be no point to what he did."

He did it to make sure no one else had to, because he is not as bad as he pretends, because maybe he loves her most, but he loves all of them, and he was too afraid to let go of anyone else.

He has not just saved her, but all of them, and there is nothing about her death that would make what he did pointless.

"Ellone, please. I have to take that chance. Seifer would understand. If it were me…if it were me, he would do the same."

She twists the material of her pants up between her fingers, hooks her nails hard into it, an anchor: the only one she has right now. "_Please, _Ellone."

* * *

><p>Zell has been spun away into the void somewhere, which is just as well: he has this way of looking sad that is so visceral it's like all his anguish steals its way inside of you, magnifies your own, plucks you like a string, and he is already humming on so many frequencies he can't take anything else.<p>

He sits down in front of the capsule and does not move for a very long time.

In Time Compression, you are never quite still: the sky above you moves, shifts, breaks itself open; the ground below you jerks, shudders, twitches itself slowly up and up and up and then resettles itself one gradual inch at a time. You are rattled, shaken, tentatively touched by hot white fingers of electricity that smoke the air and smoke your lungs, but he does the best he can anyway, to preserve this stillness, to keep himself rooted, a statue.

The thing is, he is not sure he can move anymore, or if he even should.

He is _supposed to_- he knows this. But all his life he has been doing things he is supposed to, because someone higher ranking ordered him to, because the SeeD collar at his throat is not so much a simple fold of decorative cloth as it is a noose-

And this one task that is most important of all for him to complete, to blindly carry out, is the one he can least see himself following through with.

He is seated on a cliff, a jagged finger of land that stretches out into thunderstorm gray that goes on forever, that folds and folds again, that will go on folding and re-folding itself for as long as the earth keeps spinning on its axis, and if he moves it is over: There are no second chances in Time Compression.

Not once you step beyond the gray.

There are exits scattered here and there, carefully hidden, sporadic enough that it is only random dumb luck that will set you loose, make you free, but not inside that thunderstorm gray.

Inside that thunderstorm gray is only eternity, clicking and ticking and spinning on without you.

Seifer wants him to condemn them both to that.

Rinoa, he understands; Rinoa, he can almost accept.

He likes to think that when Seifer stabbed her through the chest, he did not so much slice down through layers of bone and muscle and fragile beating organs as cut her bonds; snap her chains, and now she is somewhere beyond, safe with everyone else they have already lost.

She is free, finally, he tells himself.

But Almasy…Almasy is still inside there, and Squall is not sure he is ready to let go of this old rival who used to be a brother, who understands him, even if he does not like him.

Quistis was right after all.

They have butted heads for so long that hating Seifer is an instinct, something comfortable for him to turn to when he is not sure of anything else, but that's all it is: a little flicker in the back of his heart that he cannot stop clinging to, cannot quite let go of, but now it is time for the real letting go, and he _can't_-

He did it once but he can't do it again, not now that it has come down to this moment of skipped heartbeats and sweating palms and hiccups stopped dead in the back of his throat, burning where they stick-

He is sealing away two people he cares about now. For the good of everyone else he loves, he _gets it_, but why does this have to be so _hard_-

He tips his head back a long ways.

Seifer is a broken pile at her feet, on his knees, head bowed, and for just a moment, if he squints his eyes just right, if his brain can just smudge away the awkward angle of Seifer's left hand and the blood that has been flash-frozen to his face and fingers and the tattered ribbons of the mangled SeeD uniform he worked so hard for, Squall can pretend this is a scene from one of Matron's storybooks, the loyal knight and his princess, and only then does it not hurt quite so much.

It will never _stop _hurting, but if he can just dull this sharp prickling in his chest, this twisting, he can pull his boots up underneath him, dust himself slowly off, set his hands against the glass, stare up into her eyes one last time, drink in the long mercury-gleaming lines of this gunblade he will never spar again-

And he can push.

He can set his shoulder to it, drive the sharp bone of its blade against the door, put his back into it, shift the capsule half an inch along this cliff beneath his feet toward all that swirling gray eternity with no exit.

He stops to wipe his eyes.

He pretends it is only perspiration dripping slowly down his forehead and into his lashes, and he presses his hands to the glass again, pushes again, stops again.

He progresses slowly inch by inch by inch this way, pressing, pushing, stopping, and he has to keep swallowing past these hot wet hiccups stuck in his throat, these little gasps for air that are not hiccups after all but aborted sobs, but he will keep pushing anyway, because he has to, because he has a son waiting for him to come home and friends he needs to keep safe and Hyne he is _fucking sorry_, but this is the only way to do it-

His eyes are not quite wet enough to blur the insistent flashing of the indicator light beside the door. He watches it wink, wink again, these little intermittent skips between flickers of neon orange stretching longer, becoming elastic, reaching out and out and out, until there is so space at all between them, until there are no flickers of neon orange at all but simply empty black glass, staring back at him.

He takes a step back, another, chokes on something hot and wet and persistent pushing its way up into his throat-

Seifer sways, slumps slowly backward against the door, shivering it underneath him, flexing this handprint-streaked plastic beneath his spine-

And Rinoa blinks.

* * *

><p>The boy is watching her.<p>

Just for a moment, until his eyes roll back in his head and he goes still, completely motionless, and now there is only her own soft breathing and the man beyond this tiny cramped prison cell of a thing, blinking stupidly at her.

There is not enough room to maneuver free her knight's sword, but a low-level Cure staunches the blood flow and keeps her alive, for the moment, and just the subtlest press of her mind is enough to squeal the door free of its hinges and launch it, spinning, out into the gray winter sky beyond her.

_-rinoa _don't_-_

There is a tingling at the edge of her memory, an itching, a recollection she cannot quite hold onto, and then she steps over her knight and down into the soft dry sand beneath her prison, and she is suddenly ripped away, suctioned out-

* * *

><p>"Squall?" she whispers.<p>

He lunges forward to catch her as she goes down.

She is all frail bird bone bundle in his arms, angles upon angles upon angles, her pale dry-desert lips twitching, twitching again, and he holds her face carefully against his chest as the hot wet hiccups in his throat break open, flood his eyes, and now all he can see is Almasy sprawled halfway across the lip of the capsule, both eyes shut beneath layers of blood that have not yet dried, and is he even still _breathing_- he can't see any sort of movement- please say he is, please please _please-_

"I think Seifer's dead," she says, and starts to sob.

* * *

><p>He is.<p>

* * *

><p>He sits with Hyperion across his lap.<p>

The sky moves above him and the ground shifts underneath him, and he can only sit, staring down at his own reflection.

He thinks about the other man with the scarred face this blade has reflected back so very very many times before, and he can only go on numbly sitting, not saying anything.

* * *

><p>"Squall," she says softly.<p>

He does not look up at her.

He doesn't know what to do with the body. Can he take it back through Time Compression with him? Can he look Quistis in the eyes with Seifer Almasy hanging dead over his shoulder, or Zell, or Ellone, or _himself_-

Maybe it _should _have been him; maybe it is better for Adan to have a dead father than a _cowardly _one, who lets everyone else do the sacrificing for him-

"Squall."

His chest is so full that whatever has birthed itself inside his ribcage has expanded up and out into his throat, and now he can only breathe in little whistling gasps that hurt, that _burn_, and someone please _tell him what to do _what is the _right choice_-

"Squall." She kneels in front of him with the sky roiling over her shoulders and the ground shaking underneath her and she extends both hands, an offering, and he blinks dumbly up at her, wheezing, and how can she have dried her eyes so quickly, how can she look so _composed_-

"He's dead," he says hoarsely. "What do I do, Rinoa?" His throat sticks on her name, seals itself closed, and he sits with both hands pressed into fists, his knuckles pushing themselves down into the folds of Seifer's ruined uniform, Hyperion across one thigh, Seifer's cheek propped up against the other.

She brushes hair from his eyes, and he can only lean forward, let his own cheek be compressed, sink down and down and down until he can feel the outlines of all the thin little bones in her hand. "I don't…I don't know what to do, Rinoa. Tell me what to do," he whispers, and he listens to his voice fracture, shiver apart into little pieces that stick in his throat the way her name did.

He doesn't want to leave here, not now, not when he has Quistis to face, and Zell, and maybe just minutes ago he resigned himself to tipping their blood-smudged prison over the side of this cliff and into gray forever, but there was always the possibility as he edged his way inch by inch by inch toward that gray forever that he would not be able to go through with it, that he would crumple, cave, but now there is no changing his mind; now there is no going back; now there is only Seifer Almasy still and soundless and going cold on the ground beside him, and it is like a piece of him has been cut out, torn away, and he _doesn't want to leave _don't tell him to _doesn't she understand what he is going to have to face, when he goes back_?

"It's ok, Squall. Can I see him? Do you mind if I look at him?" she asks, and now he can see little flashes of wetness after all, and he realizes she has not dried her eyes at all, but simply run out of tears.

She kneels beside him, smiling, and her pale little hands slide themselves beneath Seifer Almasy's head, lift it gently, and he keeps his hands tangled up in all these bloody scraps of SeeD uniform, not moving, barely breathing, because beneath his fingers Almasy's cold dead heart twitches suddenly, thumps once-

* * *

><p>She does not understand how she did it so long ago, when it was Squall in her arms and not this blond-haired mirror of him, so she simply closes her eyes and <em>reaches<em>, fumbling down around inside herself for something she does not even recognize, tugging, pulling, reeling whatever it is into the light, one final time-

* * *

><p>"Rinoa-"<p>

Almasy's chest shudders.

Rises.

Sinks slowly.

Beneath their lids, her eyes move, and move again.

He stops breathing, like only one of them can do it at a time, like all the oxygen he is not taking into his own lungs will slip down into Seifer's instead, and he simply _exists_, through each weak thump and the time in between that lasts too long, that is still too fragile-

"Rinoa-" Almasy will hear how his voice is strangled, choked: he will never hear the end of it, but it will not matter, if Almasy can hear at all again-

Please please please let him hold on she can't do this much longer-

The next beat hiccups, stumbles, flatlines; he does not feel another.

"Rinoa?" His voice is still strangled, choked down into nothing, but it doesn't look as though Almasy will hear this after all, so it isn't as though he has anything to be ashamed of, but _please_, he doesn't _care _if he is dubbed Chicken Wuss in Zell's place- just _fucking breathe, asshole_-

* * *

><p>Please please please please please <em>please please<em>-

* * *

><p>"Squall," she says tightly, her voice as strangled as his own, stifled into this thin little whisper he can barely even hear, "let go of him. Step back, just for a second. I don't…I don't want to hurt you if this doesn't work."<p>

He unwinds his fingers.

Steps away.

Feels the hard cliff ground beneath his knees and the stale dirt underneath his fingers, because he is not strong enough to stand and watch this, because his legs are all water and newborn foal underneath him, and she is so _close_, oh Hyne, _please_, Rinoa-

* * *

><p>She cradles his head in her hands, remembers another boy's hair between her fingers a long time ago, wet heat in her throat and tears in her eyes, and if this worked before, it has to work again, it <em>has to<em>-

She shuts her eyes.

She pours everything she is into him.

* * *

><p>She breathes jaggedly, cries out, and he watches from three feet away, too afraid to interfere, too afraid to break this tenuous connection between them, too afraid it will kill her, too afraid it won't fix him-<p>

He is always afraid of one thing or another: failing Garden, his peers, Cid's expectations; losing his son, his friends, his father. It is just that there has always been this mask here to catch him when he falls, to seal him away, brick him over, except now it has been peeled off, flung aside, and he is all raw and hurting underneath, and the cold thunderstorm breeze chafes this rawness, this new Squall under all the callused old layers he has spent years building up, and he can barely breathe, watching them, can hardly stand to _watch_-

She looks up with a smile that takes his breath away, and he knows.

He _knows_.

Something is set free inside his chest, something buoyant, something that wings up higher than all that gray forever, beyond it, and now he can stand again, now he can scrape his legs up underneath him, and she is still _smiling_; this is going to be _ok_-

* * *

><p>She stands slowly.<p>

Seifer's head slides down into the dirt beneath her feet and she sways, sways again, almost falls-

He is there to steady her.

She does not look at him.

She can't, see, because she is done now, has accomplished her own little personal redemption, and now there is only one thing left for her, and she can't do it while she is looking at him.

She will map his face, drink it in, devour every little line and curve and pore, and she can't leave if she knows this familiar face is waiting for her to come back.

She uses her left hand to slide his fingers gently off her right elbow, and takes a step forward.

"Rinoa, what are you doing?"

"It's ok, Squall."

It hurts so very badly to smile right now.

"You'll be ok now. Everything's going to work out, ok?"

His voice squeezes, is compressed, and she loses her smile, lets it slip, takes another step forward.

"Rinoa, _wait_- what are you doing?"

She is heading for the gray where there are no exits, just time, forever and beyond.

"What are you _doing_; she's gone, isn't she- Rinoa, _stop_-"

She pauses.

It is such a long way down from this cliff, with nothing to cushion her.

"She isn't gone, Squall. I'm me…but she's still there. I can feel her. Them. I think it's just this place…something about it disorients them, or something. But I don't know how long it'll last, and they'll always be there inside me, waiting, and I'm not going to let them hurt anyone else, ok? It's ok. I'll be ok."

She has warned herself not to look back, to walk right out over the edge of this cliff into this swirling silver beyond, but the dull thump of his knees hitting dirt is enough to stagger her, to _undo _her, and now she pauses, tries to edge her foot out the last final few inches, and finds that she can't.

Thunderstorm wind whips in her hair and flutters her shirt, and she looks back after all, and she knows by the look on his face that he doesn't get it, that he does not _want _to, but it is not about _taking away_, can't he understand that?

It's about giving back.

It's about freedom and safety and peace and all the things they deserve to have but will not, as long as women like her go on existing, being twisted, destroying.

But she will miss him _so much_.

She does not say this.

She smiles back over her shoulder, and for just this one moment there is only the two of them, staring, memorizing, _devouring_, and she knows it is time when she is no longer sure she can do this.

She turns away.

What does it feel like, to fall forever? To never reach the end? There is _supposed _to be an end one day, for each and every individual story that plays itself out all over the world; maybe it comes too soon or not soon enough or maybe it is not the ending that was wanted, that was prayed for, but there is _always _an ending, a resolution.

One day you lie down and you close your eyes and you do not open them ever again, and that is the way it is supposed to go, but every time her eyes close they will always open again, to this wasteland of fog and dream and time moving forward without her.

Her final blink is so long it is like she just hovers in this moment, skimming the surface of it, hanging on for as long as she can, not seeing but _feeling_: thunderstorm wind in her hair and the salt sting of tears scorching through all the arid cracks in her lips to the soft new skin underneath and his wet gasps for air behind her, and no one ever told her how hard this letting go was going to be.

But for this brief precious moment in time she is herself, and this is her own decision, and she is finally free to make it.

There is a lifting inside of her, a sudden buoyancy: she is weightless now, for just this brief precious moment.

Unbound.

He calls out to her one last time- her name, she thinks, but this thunderstorm wind in her hair is so _loud_, and it is like he is already far beyond her reach, or like she is beyond his, getting bounced through all these currents and ripples and eddies the color of winter.

She wonders if there will be snow, here inside Time Compression.

And then there is no more wondering at all, because somewhere behind her he is moving again, scrabbling forward through the dirt to reach her-

She steps off the cliff.

* * *

><p>She is just…gone. The fog has closed over her head like an ocean and sucked her away with the tide.<p>

He kneels at the edge of the cliff for a very long time.

Here at the edge, the wind is very loud.

The wind is very loud and this fog like an ocean stretches on forever, and she never surfaces.

* * *

><p>She has been sitting here alone for so long that she almost doesn't realize there is suddenly another presence, a second pair of lungs clumsily inhaling, even more clumsily exhaling-<p>

In the corner opposite her, she watches something bright gold catch the light overhead, shine it back into her eyes-

"Zell?"

He brings one hand up to cover his face and through his splayed-out fingers there is just a sliver of black peeking through and now sobs rack him so hard she feels something inside her own chest wrench and break open.

She kneels beside him and slides his head into her lap, and now he holds her hands against his cheeks or she holds his cheeks in her hands, she is not sure.

"Shh," she says, and wipes her nose. "Shh, Zell. It's going to be ok. It'll be ok; I promise. One day…it's going to be ok."

* * *

><p>She is swallowed, spun, <em>hurled<em>-

She is spit right back out onto an empty beach, and for a very long time she can only stare at the sky, trying to remember.

The sky is all soft rain-mist against clouds the color of Time Compression when she finally understands that there is nothing to remember at all.

She has been spun so quickly through Time Compression that this time it is nothing but a featureless gray blur in her head: no stretching eons of fog billowing on forever into the distance or the muffled _tap-tap-tapping _of her heartbeat footsteps, pounding their way toward this exit just as it closes, that one just as it opens-

There is only her and a beach and vague nausea in her belly and swelling pressure in her temples, and either Ellone did not have the power to push her all the way inside, shove her from one dimension into the next, or her own body rejected the journey, pushed her right back out the other side onto this beach she does not recognize.

She isn't sure.

All she can do is lie here and understand that she will never see him again, that this was her last chance, and this understanding hollows her, bows her inward, and all she can do is sag down and down and down into herself, where there is nothing, where she can curl up and not feel for a very long time.

She closes her eyes.

This void inside of her is cold, but she does not mind.

The rain at least is warm.

* * *

><p>The first thing he notices is that he can breathe.<p>

Not through a thousand cresting little waves of blood breaking against his tongue like the goddamned tide coming to shore, but normally.

Without pain.

He tests his lungs once, twice, twitches his numb wood-block left hand-

And fucking imagine that.

Seifer Almasy has been put back together again after all.

He opens his eyes.

* * *

><p>She opens her eyes.<p>

In the sky above her, these Time Compression clouds peel themselves apart a little more, flatten out, and warm rain becomes hot saltwater tears on her cheeks, and please just let her hold onto this numbness a little longer- she _needs _it-

One day she will understand how to go on without him, and she will do it, and she will _succeed _at it, because this is what Quistis Marae Trepe _does_: she achieves, accomplishes, stretches out with both hands for a goal she will one day reach- but for right now- for right now she does not understand a _goddamned thing_, and piss on all her goals anyway because they never made her happy: _he _made her happy and why did he _have to be taken from her_-

Somewhere down the beach, there is a sound.

A scraping of heavy-soled boots in sand, a rustling of clothing-

Loud cussing.

Far down this empty beach she does not recognize, a man pushes himself up onto all fours, spitting sand, and now her legs are suddenly underneath her, wobbling, but she does not have time to wait for them to catch up to the sudden pounding of her heartbeat because there is something _familiar _about this man and the shape he carves into this Time Compression sky above her-

She stumbles, trips, goes to her knees, is back on her feet so quickly she cannot even remember falling-

He spits again, cusses again, lifts a hand to his bright blonde hair, streaked wet-sand wheat-

And she runs.

* * *

><p>Fucking Pubes goddamned <em>fucking <em>fucked the whole thing up- he is not supposed to _be _here, the _fucker_-

"_Seifer_!"

"_Fuck_."

His boots slip in the wet sand as he tries to get them underneath him, but it doesn't matter, because he hits a dead sprint before his legs are even entirely assembled beneath him, and three long strides of this dead fucking sprint are all it take him to reach her just in time for his useless goddamned knees to buckle and fold, and now he goes down with her in his arms.

"_Goddammit_- he fucked up. Did it work? Is Rinoa- do you feel- are you ok? Do you feel any fucking different?" he spits out as fast as he can between teeth that screw themselves so tightly together the pain in his jaw shoots all the way up into his temples. He holds her face between his hands so hard he is probably hurting her, but he is so goddamned fucking _afraid _of what will happen if he lets go-

He watches her eyebrows bunch together, smooth back out, and now sudden comprehension lights her eyes up all the way down to the bottom, and she fucking _smiles _at him, and now there is a hollowing-out of his stomach, a plunging, and he can't breathe at all into the space between this smile and the euphoric "_No_," she squeezes out from behind it. "I'm fine. I feel…normal."

* * *

><p>On his knees in the surf, he hugs her face ecstatically to his chest, and he is holding her so tightly she can barely breathe, but it does not matter.<p>

She has him back.

Later, she still explain to him in no uncertain terms what an asshole he is, that he will never, ever again do something so stupid, if he wishes to still retain the use of his more prized anatomical possessions, but for now-

For now she simply holds and is held in return, and this is enough.

* * *

><p>He doesn't understand what happened, but she would <em>know <em>if that thing was inside her, and she feels _nothing_- she is fucking _free_; they are _both _free, and goddammit he fucking _loves _this woman-

He has sand in his mouth when he kisses her but fuck if he cares and fuck if she cares and all this sand in this lemonbalm hair he can't stop kissing -who gives a shit about this either: he could eat an entire goddamned beachful of the shit and not give a flying _fuck_-

She is here and she is _alive _and she is _smiling _and this is all he _needs_, this is _enough_, and everything else is shit to be sorted out later.

* * *

><p>Even farther down the beach, Squall Leonhart rolls from his side onto his back, and shuts his eyes.<p>

Smiling, he thinks, will never not hurt, but he does it anyway, because look at what she has done, what she has made possible-

And he understands about the giving back, that it was not about taking away but offering something more; it's just going to take him some _time_, ok?

But he forgives her for that final step.

And forgiving- that's kind of a letting go all on its own, isn't it?

He has never done this before because it hurts, because it is frightening, because letting go is also about falling and he is not sure how long this fall will last, or what is waiting for him at the bottom-

But she taught him that sometimes the fall is worth it, even if the landing hurts.

He opens his eyes to the rain and the salt spray of the ocean and the early-winter clouds above him, and whatever it is that comes next.

He wants to see it, even if she is not here to see it with him.

**A/N: So, over 500,000 words later, this story arc is finally finished. I thought of adding a little more onto this epilogue, but that last line is where I wanted it to stop, because my stories are not pretty, and they are not neatly tied up in bows, and it just didn't feel right to continue on any farther. I greatly enjoyed writing this, and I procrastinated on this last chapter because I'm a lazy piece of shit like that, but also because it was really hard to put this all behind me, even though I'm moving right on to my next project. I hope you all enjoyed reading this, even though I killed some of your favorite characters, put even more of your favorite characters through absolute hell, and did not get poor Zell laid nearly enough.**

**I want to thank everyone who has ever reviewed; I appreciate your support so much. I appreciate you sticking with me through over half a million words of fanfic, I am grateful that there are still enough Seiftis fans out there to even give a crap about this couple, and I am even more grateful that those who do give a crap about this couple also decided to give a crap about my writing. To the silent majority, who lurk behind visitor numbers but do not comment, thank you for your support as well, for adding this to your favorites lists, for faithfully following along with me through both Ashes and Witch, and I hope to see you next time.**

**To four people in particular, for reviewing just about every chapter, for letting me know there are indeed still people interested in this story and these characters, and for encouraging me when I started to feel all small and whiny inside. **

**Dee: Your reviews made me laugh and they made me smile, and they were always perfectly-timed, coming in just when I was starting to question if I should even keep posting, if anyone except me even cared anymore. Thank you so much.**

**Mischkaaa: For your unfailing love for Seifer, even when he acted like an absolute penis at times. For reviewing so quickly sometimes that I could pretend my readers were just sitting around continuously refreshing the page waiting for me to update the story, and for supporting all the bromance. Seifer and Zell appreciate it, although Seifer will never admit it.**

**Tequila Princess: For navigating part of Ashes while pregnant, giving birth, and then STILL coming back after all of that to see this through all the way to the end. Thanks for remembering this between all the diaper changes and the late nights. If that's not loyalty to the fandom, I don't know what is.**

**Arisa K: You came to the game a little later than everyone else, but you've been a faithful reviewer and a faithful nagger, and I love you for it. (Seriously, guys, she threatens me. I was thinking of her when I posted this, because I was going to put it off yet _again_, but she knows which state I'm from now, and she might track me down.) I expect my mail box to start blowing up in regards to the novelization now, but I'm counting on this to buy me a very brief reprieve.**

**Basically, thank you guys, thank you thank you thank you, and please stick around for what comes next. Thus far, I have a prologue, two chapters, and two interludes of my novelization finished, with work already started on the third chapter. The prologue is pretty short, so I'll probably post that by the end of the week as a little teaser. First chapter will go up when I have time to polish it.**

**See you guys around. **


End file.
